


Forever And A Day

by telperion_15



Series: Nick/Connor [16]
Category: Primeval
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Canon, Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, Dreams, Gen, M/M, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-19
Updated: 2012-02-19
Packaged: 2017-10-31 10:38:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 22,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/343091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telperion_15/pseuds/telperion_15
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once again, Nick returns through an anomaly to find himself in a different world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Day 1

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for episode 1.06.

He’d known it was a stupid idea to follow Helen through the anomaly. ‘A moment of madness’ Connor would probably have called it. ‘Sheer bloody idiocy’ would have been Lester’s take on the situation, he suspected.  
  
But Nick knew why he’d done it really. Every time he saw her, Helen dropped more hints about the anomalies, and no matter how much he wanted her out of all their lives, he wanted answers more. And she was the only one who could give them to him.  
  
On the other side of the anomaly it was a bright, warm day, with blue sky and racing clouds. Not too dissimilar to the climate he’d left. He was standing in the middle of a wide swathe of grassland that stretched off in all directions as far as the eye could see. There were a few stands of deciduous-looking trees, but essentially the land was flat and open.  
  
And Helen, naturally, was nowhere to be seen. There wasn’t anywhere for her to hide – not that she could have reached in the short time since Nick had last set eyes on her, in any case – but nonetheless, she was gone. As always.  
  
Sighing to himself, Nick acknowledged to himself that he hadn’t really expected anything different. Helen probably wouldn’t have given him any information even if he _had_ caught up to her. He wasn’t even sure why she’d bothered to show up, today of all days. It was barely a month since her failed incursion into the ARC, and feelings among the project team were running a little higher than normal when it came to his ex-wife. Nick would have expected Helen to realise that, and keep her distance.  
  
But no, she had popped up at the anomaly site today, led them a merry dance around the nature reserve, and then promptly disappeared through the anomaly. By that time, Nick was so pissed off with the whole situation that he’d done probably the least clever thing he could have under the circumstances. He’d followed her.  
  
Jacobs was going to have his hide when he got back. Not to mention Connor.  
  
As the thought occurred to him, he frowned a little. Why hadn’t anyone come through after him? Normally the Special Forces soldiers would have been falling over themselves to drag wayward professors back to where they belonged.  
  
Nick shrugged. Maybe Jacobs was under orders from Lester. Nick wouldn’t have been surprised to find that the head of the anomaly project had decided that stupid scientists should be left to fend for themselves if they should take it into their heads to do something stupid like, say, follow their ex-wives into the past.  
  
And besides, he’d only been gone a few minutes. Jacobs and the others would soon forgive him if he went back right now.  
  
Walking the few yards back to the anomaly, Nick scanned the horizon one last time. Not a sign of Helen. He wasn’t surprised. He sighed. It was time to go home and face the music.  
  
But when he stepped through the anomaly, he knew immediately that something was wrong.  
  
No one was there. No Connor, no Abby, no Jenny, no soldiers. And no evidence that they had ever been there.  
  
He was still in the same place. A notice board nearby still proudly proclaimed the land he was standing on to be the property of the RSPB, and looking through the trees he could still the see the glint of water that indicated the lake that was a haven for breeding wildfowl.  
  
But his team were gone. Simply…vanished.  
  
Then he heard the sound of footsteps behind him, and he turned in relief. It was alright, someone had come to find him. It was all just a misunderstanding.  
  
But he didn’t recognise the man walking towards him with a concerned expression on his face. Tall, thin, long dark hair tied back in a ponytail, faded jeans, and a black t-shirt. A stranger.  
  
“Nicholas? Oh, thank god. We’ve been looking for you for hours. Where the hell did you go? We’ve been going out of our minds.”  
  
“And you would be?” Nick asked suspiciously.  
  
There was a moment of surprised hesitation. “What are you talking about? You know who I am.”  
  
“No, I don’t.” Nick’s voice was flat, but his mind was racing. What was going on here? Who was this person? How did he know who Nick was?  
  
Somewhere under the deluge of questions the obvious answer was struggling to make itself heard. But Nick ignored it. That was an answer he didn’t even want to contemplate. Because it meant that everything was gone. Again.  
  
“What is going on here?” the man was saying. “Of course you know me. I’m Rob. We’ve only worked together for nine years, for god’s sake. What kind of stupid game is this, Nicholas?”  
  
“Don’t call me that,” Nick ground out. No one had called him by his full name since his mother. And sometimes Helen, when they were having a row. This man didn’t have the right to call him that.  
  
Nick felt like he was drowning, swamped again by the inevitability of fate. It had happened again. He was lost. Everything was lost.  
  
“I have to go back,” he said suddenly, interrupting the man’s – Rob’s – ever growing list of questions.  
  
“Go back where? What do you mean? How can you ‘go back’?”  
  
Nick ignored him, turning back towards the anomaly. But as he started towards it, he heard a startled exclamation from the other man, and then strong arms were grabbing at him, pulling him back.  
  
“Let me go,” he cried. “I have to go back!” Suddenly his mind was flashing back to another day, another anomaly, when he’d returned to find that Claudia Brown was gone, and that everything had changed.  
  
That time it was Stephen who had stopped him from going back through the anomaly. There was no Stephen here, but there was a Rob instead. And he was trying to stop Nick again.  
  
“Are you crazy?” Rob was yelling in his ear. “You could be killed. We have no idea what these anomalies are, or what they do.”  
  
That was surprising enough to make Nick hesitate, for just a second. This man didn’t know what the anomaly was for? What it did? Who was he?  
  
His momentary surprise gave Rob the opportunity to drag Nick back a couple of feet, but then Nick was struggling again, trying to push forward.  
  
“Let me go! Let me go!”  
  
Then, with a soft pop, the anomaly closed.  
  
“No!” Nick felt his knees buckling, only Rob’s grip around him stopping him falling to the floor.  
  
“Hey, it’s okay. You’re okay. It’ll be alright.”  
  
But Nick was barely listening to the nonsense Rob was babbling at him. He couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away from the spot where the anomaly had been. It was gone. It was really gone.  
  
“I’m taking you home,” Rob said suddenly. “I’ll call the others and tell them I’ve found you, and then we’re leaving. Okay?”  
  
Nick looked round at this stranger who seemed to know him so well, staring at the other man with bleak eyes. Rob looked worried, uncomfortable, and just the tiniest bit frightened, and Nick decided to take pity on him.  
  
“Yes,” he said wearily, “I think that would be best.”


	2. Day 2

  
“I thought I might find you here.”  
  
Nick started slightly, but didn’t turn. “How did you know where to look?”  
  
“You were acting…oddly…yesterday. Something about that anomaly…got to you, didn’t it? Something’s wrong.”  
  
Biting back a bitter laugh, Nick nodded. “You could say that, yes.”  
  
The bench creaked a little as Rob sat down beside him, and joined Nick in his contemplation of the empty space where yesterday the anomaly had been.  
  
“Want to tell me about it?”  
  
“You wouldn’t believe me.”  
  
“Look, I’m a member of a team studying phenomena that everything we know about physics can’t explain. You could try me.”  
  
There were a few long seconds of silence, then Nick sighed. “It’s all Helen’s fault,” he muttered.  
  
“Who’s Helen?”  
  
“Helen. My wife.”  
  
“But you’re not married, Nicholas.”  
  
Nick thought about challenging the name usage, but decided that what he was called was the least of his problems, and let it slide. “Okay, ex-wife, then.”  
  
“But you’ve _never_ been married.”  
  
Ah. Mentally, Nick catalogued the change. “I was where I come from,” he said.  
  
“Where you come from? What the hell does that mean?”  
  
“What it means is that I’m from a parallel timeline, and somehow, thanks to the anomaly, I’ve ended up in this timeline instead.”  
  
He was almost expecting Rob’s laugh of disbelief, and didn’t let it offend him.  
  
“You must be joking!”  
  
Nick looked at him. “Do I look like I’m joking?”  
  
Rob’s ‘pull the other one’ expression died suddenly. “Okay, not joking,” he said soberly. “But you seriously expect me to believe that you’re from a parallel world? I think you’ve hit your head or something, Nicholas.”  
  
“I can assure you, I’m in perfect health,” Nick replied.  
  
Rob considered him for a couple of seconds. “Okay, then. How?” he said eventually. “How have you travelled between timelines? And how are the anomalies involved? What, you used their energy to transport yourself?”  
  
“No, of course not. I walked through it, like normal.”  
  
“ _Walked_ through it? What the hell are you talking about? You can’t walk through the anomalies.”  
  
Surprised, Nick blinked a couple of times. Then he remembered what Rob had said the previous day about having no idea what the anomalies were. At the time he’d been a little preoccupied to really register it, but now he realised he had a few questions of his own.  
  
“What do you actually know about the anomalies?” he asked.  
  
“ _We_ ,” Rob said, the emphasis on the pronoun faint but unmistakeable, “know that they’re highly magnetic, and give off all sorts of other strange readings that we can’t make head nor tale of. We’ve spent the last nine months analysing that data and gathering more every time a new anomaly appears.”  
  
“But you’ve never tried touching one, or walking through it.”  
  
“No, _we_ haven’t. You specifically said not to, remember? You said we had no idea what effect it might have.”  
  
“That sounds a bit cautious for me,” Nick mused absently. Then he raised an eyebrow. “So you have no idea what’s on the other side of the anomalies?”  
  
“On the other side? You’ve lost me again.”  
  
“The anomalies are doorways,” Nick explained. “Doorways in time. When you walk through one, you could find yourself at any point in the past or future.”  
  
‘Incredulous’ best described the expression on Rob’s face now, and Nick hurried on.  
  
“Somehow, the anomalies have also created parallel timelines. Helen – my ex-wife – told me that, and she also told me that it’s possible to move between them. But, of course, being Helen, she didn’t tell me how. And now I’m stuck here with no way of getting home.”  
  
“When you say past or future, you don’t just mean last month or next Tuesday, do you?” said Rob slowly.  
  
“No, I mean as far back or forward as you can imagine. And it works both ways, too. While we can go there, things from those eras can come to the present as well.”  
  
“Like…?”  
  
“Like, creatures, mostly. We’ve had dealings with dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, highly evolved life forms from the future. We never know what we’re going to see next.”  
  
“Oh.” Rob sounded a little blindsided by what Nick was telling him, and Nick smiled slightly, the first time he’d done so since finding himself in this new world.  
  
“Crazy, huh?”  
  
“You could say that, yeah.”  
  
“And you really didn’t know any of this?”  
  
“None of it. Nothing’s ever come through any of the anomalies we’ve seen – we’ve only ever had to deal with taking readings and collecting data. Wrangling dinosaurs was never part of the job description.”  
  
Nick frowned. “So why do you have an evolutionary zoologist on your team, then?”  
  
Rob looked even more confused. “We don’t. We’re all physicists. Well, except Jo – she’s an electronics expert.”  
  
“Ah. Well in that case, we may have some new evidence to support my story. I’m an evolutionary zoologist, you see. _Not_ a physicist.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Yep, sorry about that.”  
  
“So, you don’t know anything about physics at all?”  
  
“Well, I wouldn’t say that – I’ve been on a bit of a crash course this past year or two, trying to figure out what the anomalies are, and how they work. But I couldn’t claim to be any kind of Albert Einstein.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
Nick sent Rob a sideways look. “So you believe me then?”  
  
Rob shook his head slightly, but it looked more like an expression of puzzlement rather than one of denial. “I don’t know,” he said. “It sounds so incredible, and yet…”  
  
“Don’t worry,” said Nick. “This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, and people had trouble believing it last time as well. The difference is,” his eyes strayed back to where the anomaly had been, “that last time I let it lie. I stayed in that new world, and eventually realised that it wasn’t so bad, after all. But this time I can’t stay. I have to find a way back. I can’t go through that again.”  
  
Rob must have heard something in his voice. “Do you have people back there?” he asked softly. “Family? Friends?”  
  
“No family to speak of,” Nick replied. “My marriage was over a long time ago, thanks to my wife’s habit of disappearing into the past for years at a time. But friends, yes. _Good_ friends. We’ve been through a lot together.”  
  
“Anyone special?”  
  
Nick was silent for a few seconds, thinking. “Yes,” he said eventually. “Yes, there is someone. I _have_ to get back,” he repeated. “I don’t know how yet, but I have to.”


	3. Day 3

  
The first thing Nick felt as Rob ushered him into the office was recognition. The room already had two occupants, and as he stepped inside he was confronted by the sight of two heads bent over their desks – one dark, one artificially golden.  
  
 _Oh no, not again. Not another Jenny situation. Please._  
  
But as Rob pushed into the room beside him, the two people looked up, and with relief Nick realised that neither of them looked like he’d feared they would. Their respective hair colours were the only similarities to other people of his acquaintance, and he found himself looking into wholly unfamiliar faces.  
  
“Meet Dan and Jo Wearing,” Rob said, by way of introduction. “The terrible two, as I like to call them. Dan, Jo, this is Nicholas…Nick…Cutter.”  
  
The young man and woman were staring at him with somewhat nervous, although not unsympathetic, expressions. It was a familiar sight, and Nick wasn’t offended by it. He’d been on the receiving end of plenty such looks when he’d returned from the Permian and started claiming a woman named Claudia Brown had vanished. He was used to it.  
  
“Hi,” said Jo. “Nice to meet you.” She stuck out her hand, a little tentatively, and Nick shook it.  
  
Dan echoed the greeting, and the gesture, and then chuckled slightly, almost immediately cutting himself off. “Sorry,” he apologised. “This is just a little weird, that’s all. I mean, we feel like we already know you. Sorry,” he said again.  
  
“It’s fine,” replied Nick. “I know that feeling well.”  
  
“Well, this is our kingdom,” said Rob, trying to diffuse a little of the tension that had arisen. “Sorry about the clutter. We’re a bit strapped for space.”  
  
Nick looked around. ‘Strapped for space’ was an understatement. There was barely enough room for the four desks the office contained, never mind the filing cabinets, stacks of books, and bits and pieces of electronic equipment that were scattered around. The desks were arranged in a rectangle, and Rob indicated the one nearest the door as Nick’s, while he squeezed around the edge of the room to sit at the one opposite. Dan and Jo’s desks made up the other two sides of the rectangle.  
  
“I think they gave us the smallest office they could find,” Dan said. “We’re the Home Office’s most unwanted, if you like. Bit like Mulder on _The X-Files_. Stick us somewhere out of the way and hope we’ll get forgotten about.”  
  
Nick smiled, but it was bittersweet. Despite the differences in appearance, Dan suddenly reminded him very much of Connor. He sat down at his desk hurriedly to hide his confusion.  
  
“I must say, I’m a bit surprised,” he said quickly. “Surely a team investigating such unusual phenomena as the anomalies deserves a bit more space than this? Where I came from we have…” He broke off suddenly, uncomfortable.  
  
“Yeah, well, they may be unusual, but it takes a lot more than that to get the government excited about something,” Rob said, again covering the awkward silence. “Thus far the anomalies haven’t been proved dangerous, or useful, and until they’re either, the powers that be are quite content to let out ragtag little team watch them and analyse them to our heart’s content.” He paused. “But from what you’ve told me, that could all change at any moment.”  
  
“Yeah, Rob says you’ve fought dinosaurs!” Dan said enthusiastically, and Nick was once again forcibly reminded of another young man he’d left behind.  
  
“Shut up, Dan,” Jo hissed, chucking a ruler at him. She looked at Nick, again with that combination of nervousness and sympathy. “I’m sorry about what’s happened to you,” she said. “It’s a bit difficult to get our heads round it, but rest assured we’ll do everything we can to help you.” Then she grinned. “And please ignore my brother. He wouldn’t know tact if it battered him over the head!”  
  
Nick smiled back, touched by her words. Then something struck him. “Brother?” he enquired. “Well, that explains the surname, I suppose.”  
  
“We’re twins,” Dan proclaimed.  
  
“Not identical though?”  
  
“Not in the _slightest_ ,” Jo said.  
  
“Oh, I don’t know,” Rob interjected. “You’re both as annoying as each other, that’s for sure.” He chuckled at the pair’s simultaneous exclamations of annoyance, and Nick found himself joining in.  
  
“And they’re both geniuses, of course,” Rob continued. “Dan is a physics wiz – best student you ever had, you always say – and like I said yesterday, there isn’t an electrical device in the world that Jo can’t figure out. They make me feel quite average sometimes,” he finished glumly.  
  
“Aw, Rob, don’t say that,” said Dan. “You know Nicholas always thought of _you_ as his best student until I came along.” He grinned cheekily, and then ducked as another piece of office equipment headed his way.  
  
“And you really know nothing about physics?” Jo asked hesitantly.  
  
“Not enough to have taught these two anything,” Nick replied. “I’m really just a layman.”  
  
“What’s Newton’s first law of motion?” Dan shot at him suddenly.  
  
“I’ve no earthly idea,” said Nick. “Really, I’m not a physicist. I’m a zoologist.”  
  
“Wow.” Dan turned to Rob. “ _Now_ I believe it. He _must_ have come from another world!”  
  
“As I said, not a single tactful bone in his body,” Jo muttered, glaring at her brother.  
  
“It’s okay,” Nick assured her. “I’m just worried I’m not going to be much use to you, that’s all. You don’t seem to have much use for a dinosaur wrangler at the moment. In fact, maybe I should go and come clean to your boss.”  
  
“Christine Johnson? I wouldn’t, if I were you,” said Rob seriously. “She thinks this whole project is a complete waste of time as it is. She’d like nothing better than to disband our little group, and a crazy professor claiming to come from a parallel timeline would give her all the reason she needs.”  
  
“Ah,” said Nick. “Maybe I won’t go and see her, then.” _Suddenly Lester doesn’t seem so bad._ “But it doesn’t change the fact that I’m not sure if I really fit in here any more.”  
  
“Are you kidding?” exclaimed Dan. “From what Rob’s told us, it sounds like you’ve had much more experience of these anomalies than we have. Your insights will be invaluable!”  
  
“Well, if you really think so…” Nick said slowly. But secretly, he was relieved. He _needed_ to be here. He needed to be close to the anomalies. He didn’t have a hope of getting home otherwise.


	4. Day 7

  
“Who’s that?”  
  
Nick stared at the picture on the computer screen for a few seconds longer before he answered. “His name is Connor Temple and he’s doing a PhD in Evolutionary Zoology at the Central Metropolitan University.”  
  
“Oh.” There was a pause. “You know him, in your timeline, right?” Jo asked eventually.  
  
Nick nodded. “I was a professor at CMU before I became involved in the anomalies. Connor was my student. Now he’s my colleague.”  
  
“And your friend?”  
  
“You could say that, yes.”  
  
“What does that mea…” Then Jo caught sight of the wistful expression on Nick’s face. “ _Oh_.”  
  
“I’ve shocked you.”  
  
“No, you haven’t. I’m just a little surprised, that’s all. Our Nicholas didn’t…er…wasn’t that way inclined.”  
  
“I didn’t know I was until I met him,” Nick confessed. “And even then it took me a while to see what was staring me right in the face.”  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
“Maybe you could…go and see him?” Jo gestured at the picture on the screen.  
  
“Oh, I don’t think that’s a very good idea. He won’t know who I am. And to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I could take it without cracking up.”  
  
“Sorry,” said Jo again. “It was a stupid suggestion.”  
  
“No, it wasn’t,” replied Nick. “Believe me, I’ve been sitting here for the last half an hour convincing myself not to do it. It just…wouldn’t be a very good idea,” he repeated softly.  
  
He felt Jo squeeze his shoulder gently, and was grateful for the comfort even as he wished she’d just go away. Suddenly he didn’t want company.  
  
Jo seemed to pick up on the vibe, lifting her hand from his shoulder and stepping towards the door. “I think I’m going to get a coffee. You want me to bring you one back?”  
  
“No, thanks. I’m fine.”  
  
“Okay, I’ll see you later, then. I’d better go and find Rob and Dan anyway. God only knows where they’ve got to. Probably trying to see if there are any bigger offices available again.”  
  
Nick smiled thinly at her, and she smiled back, before opening the door quietly and slipping out.  
  
Nick’s gaze returned to the computer screen. He knew it had been a stupid idea to tempt himself this way, but he hadn’t been able to help himself. For the past week he had been carefully thinking only about the need to get home, and not what he needed to get home to. It had been self-protection really.  
  
But today, for some reason, he hadn’t been able to stop himself. He’d opened the search window on his computer before he’d really realised what he was doing.  
  
They were all here, somewhere. All leading their own lives completely separate to his. None of them had ever known a Nicholas Cutter, or had any idea the anomalies existed.  
  
Stephen, he’d discovered, had made good on his shooting prospects, and had actually been to the last three Olympics, winning medals at both Athens and Beijing (apparently Olympic venues were one of the things that didn’t change across the timelines). He now owned his own shooting range in Southampton, and was by all accounts training the next round of prospective champions.  
  
Abby worked for an animal charity in Africa that rehabilitated elephants, giraffes, and rhinos and released them into a specially protected reserve. The picture on the foundation’s website showed her smiling and happy with a group of other keepers.  
  
Lester still worked in the government (Nick found it difficult to imagine him working anywhere else), only here he was in the Foreign Office instead of the Home Office. Smiling slightly, Nick had wondered if he still terrorised his underlings the way he had at the ARC.  
  
Likewise, Jenny was still in PR. But here she seemed to be more involved in polishing the images of actresses and rock stars, glossing over their misdemeanours and making them appear more intelligent than they really were. Nick had found the idea unworthy of Jenny’s skills.  
  
And Connor… He’d left Connor until last, even though he didn’t kid himself that the young man hadn’t been the object of the exercise from the start. Like he’d told Jo, Connor was still at CMU, still studying extinct species, still a bright and enthusiastic young man. The image he’d found showed Connor at a party hosted by the university’s Sci-Fi Society, grinning from ear to ear and brandishing a drink. His life seemed to have progressed exactly the same as it had done for the Connor Nick had known.  
  
Except neither of them had ever met the other. Or would ever meet the other.  
  
He had a good team here. He had Rob and Dan and Jo instead of Stephen and Connor and Abby. And there was the elusive Christine Johnson, who Nick had yet to meet, and who sounded like she could out-Lester Lester.  
  
They worked well together, by all accounts, and got the job done. But they weren’t who he wanted them to be, and they never would be.  
  
Sighing softly, Nick looked at the picture of Connor one last time before closing down the window and shutting off his computer.


	5. Day 44

  
Nick had been there almost a month and a half before he experienced his first anomaly in this new world. It seemed that the phenomena were nowhere near as frequent as in his timeline, and while he’d been surprised at first at how much time the team spent in their cramped office, it had actually turned out to be quite beneficial, allowing Nick to get up to speed on all the data and research his new colleagues had done thus far.  
  
But finally an anomaly appeared, as they always did in the end, and it was time for a field trip.  
  
The team even had their own version of an anomaly detector, albeit far less flashy and hi-tech than the one Connor had built. Jo had piggybacked her rather rudimentary device on to one of the radio antennae on the roof of the Home Office building, and then remote-linked her computer to it. When the 87.6 FM frequency was interrupted, the computer emitted a loud beeping sound, at least as obnoxious in the small space of the office as the siren Nick was used to hearing.  
  
Luckily, on that particular morning, Jo had been sitting right by the computer, and had turned off the alert as soon as it had started. She tapped away on the keys for a few seconds, and then looked up to find Nick watching her avidly.  
  
“Oh. Er, sorry, Nicholas…Nick, it’s not…”  
  
Nick waved her words away. “It’s okay, I wasn’t really expecting it to be…”  
  
But he couldn’t deny to himself that just for a moment hope had flared wildly, and now it was gone he felt like someone had punched him in the gut.  
  
“Right, come on, let’s go,” said Rob briskly. “Otherwise the thing will be gone by the time we get there.” He flashed Nick a quick smile, and Nick shrugged back as he slipped out the door.  
  
*   *   *   *   *  
  
The anomaly site was about an hour outside London, on a farm in Sussex. As they pulled up in front of the farmhouse in their one and only vehicle, Nick belatedly thought to wonder how they were going to explain their presence here, and get permission to go traipsing over the farmer’s fields.  
  
But Rob nodded at Jo. “Go and do your stuff.”  
  
“Yep, go and butter him up, sis,” added Dan, grinning.  
  
Jo scowled at him, and then climbed out of the car just as the farmer appeared round the side of the house. He looked faintly suspicious, but Jo seemed to be saying all the right things, and after only a couple of minutes she was waving to the rest of them as she headed back towards the truck.  
  
“He’s more than happy to let us do our surveying,” she said loudly, as Nick and the others emerged into the fresh air.  
  
Nick sent her a questioning look. “What?”  
  
“We’re from a landscape archaeology company,” Rob explained. “We’re trying to build up an historical and geographical map of the area.”  
  
“He seemed quite enthusiastic, actually,” Jo said as she stopped next to Dan. “I think he was hoping he might be able to get on _Time Team_ or something.”  
  
“Seems Tony Robinson is a fixture in all universes, then…” Nick muttered.  
  
“We have a standard set of stories and excuses that get us into places to look at the anomalies.” Rob continued his explanation. “Which one we use depends on where we are.”  
  
“Who tells them depends on the circumstances, too,” put in Dan. “Seems the female touch was required this time.”  
  
Jo glared at him again. “And what about last time?” she said. “I seem to recall that nice lady was more than happy to let us into that derelict church hall after you’d flashed your dimples at her and told her we were from a heritage renovation charity.”  
  
“Well, when you’ve got it, you’ve got it…” said Dan airily.  
  
“Shut up, you two,” said Rob sternly. Pulling out a handheld anomaly detector (that looked much like the clunky prototypes Nick remembered using a while back), he looked at it for a moment, and then pointed off down one of the tracks leading to the fields. “It’s that way,” he announced. “Not too far, by the looks of it. Grab the equipment, and let’s…”  
  
He broke of abruptly, and looked awkwardly at Nick. “Er, sorry,” he said. “I seem to have stolen leadership from you…”  
  
“Don’t worry,” replied Nick. “I’m not your Nicholas Cutter, and therefore I’m not I’m really qualified to be in charge here. Lead on.” He smiled to himself as he spoke. Everyone at home would be amazed to hear him give up being in charge like that. But here it seemed the logical course of action.  
  
The anomaly turned out to be hidden behind a hay barn in the corner of a field, and Nick watched as Rob, Dan, and Jo quickly and efficiently set up their monitoring equipment. While he’d been happy to let Rob lead, all the activity left him feeling rather superfluous to requirements, and he paced aimlessly as the other three took their readings and watched the anomaly closely.  
  
It was completely different to most of the other anomaly experiences he’d had. Normally by now he would be running from something with big teeth, or falling on his arse as he tried to catch something small and scuttling.  
  
But here there were no creatures, no adrenaline, and no danger. It was almost…boring.  
  
Idly, he stepped towards the anomaly and reached out a hand towards it, letting the sparkling shards sweep past his fingertips as he watched them absently.  
  
“Nick, what are you doing?” Jo’s voice sounded worried, and Nick turned to smile at her reassuringly.  
  
“Don’t worry, it won’t hurt me.”  
  
“Are they really doorways in time?” Dan asked, moving up to stand beside him, although he stopped short of putting out his hand like Nick had.  
  
“Yep,” Nick replied.  
  
“And what’s on the other side?”  
  
“Who knows? Could be anywhere.”  
  
“Does it hurt to go through?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Maybe we should…take a look?”  
  
Nick thought about it. What harm could a quick trip do?  
  
 _What harm did a quick trip do last time?_ whispered a voice in his head.  
  
“No, I don’t think so. This anomaly seems to be a quiet one. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?”  
  
Dan looked slightly disappointed, but didn’t challenge him. Nick tried very hard not to think of what he had just done as cowardice.  
  
 _It’s just common sense, that’s all,_ he thought. _No sense in looking for trouble._  
  
“We find the anomalies don’t last very long,” Dan said, changing the subject a little. “Between two and three hours is the average. One stretched to four and a half, but we’ve had nothing more than that.” He looked at his watch. “I wouldn’t expect this one to be around for much longer.”  
  
He was right. Less than ten minutes later the anomaly pulsed a couple of times, and then winked out.  
  
Rob stood up from his camping chair and stretched. “Right, let’s pack up and go home,” he said. “And then tomorrow we can start the fun of analysing all the new data.”  
  
“Whoop-dee-doo,” muttered Dan sarcastically, darting a quick look at Nick.  
  
“Oh, come on, Dan, you know every piece of new data is useful,” Jo said.  
  
“Not to mention all the information Nick here has been able to give us,” added Rob encouragingly. “We know loads more about the anomalies than we did two months ago.”  
  
But as Nick followed them back to the truck, he realised that they were just putting a brave face on things. They could collect as much data as they liked, but nothing was a substitute for really seeing how the anomalies worked. For touching and experiencing those other eras.  
  
 _Next time,_ he told himself. _Next time I’ll show them._


	6. Day 45

A sharply cleared throat behind him had Nick swivelling hurriedly in his chair, cracking his knee on the leg of his desk in the process. Ignoring the pain, he eyed the woman standing the doorway to the office.  
  
High heels, power suit, long dark hair, and very red lipstick – the woman couldn’t have labelled herself more clearly as a predator if she’d had a neon sign flashing above her head. Nick kept his welcoming smile firmly in place, and inclined his head to invite her into the room.  
  
“Hello. Can I help you?”  
  
The woman didn’t move. “Oh, I hope so,” she said, the sarcastic sweetness in her voice putting Nick even more on his guard. “I believe you investigated an anomaly yesterday, is that right?”  
  
 _How did she know that?_  
  
“Er, yes, that’s right.”  
  
“And why haven’t I been informed about it?”  
  
“I…er…”  
  
“You know I expect a full report of all anomaly activity on my desk the morning after each occurrence,” the woman snapped. “Imagine my surprise when, despite my knowledge that you and your team left to go chasing after one yesterday, no such report arrived today.”  
  
“Oh. Sorry…I…” _Who was this woman?_  
  
“You may think the size of this project means you can fly under the radar and ‘forget’ things like paperwork,” the woman continued. “But I assure you, Professor Cutter, that the Home Office takes all its projects _very_ seriously, no matter how…insignificant…they are.”  
  
 _Insignificant? The anomalies?_ Nick still wasn’t clear on who the woman might be, but he was beginning to see that there was some truth the rest of his team’s claims that the government only cared about the anomaly project in terms of how much of its budget they could slash.  
  
“Now, look here, I don’t know what you think you’re talking about, but…”  
  
“Oh! Ms. Johnson. How nice to see you.”  
  
Rob’s voice floated over the woman’s shoulder from out in the corridor, and with a sigh the woman, Ms. Johnson, stepped aside slightly to allow him entry to the office.  
  
 _Of course,_ Nick thought. _This is Christine Johnson. My boss._ Suddenly nervous, he glanced at her again. The woman’s gaze was far too shrewd for his liking.  
  
“Is there anything we can do for you, Ms. Johnson?” Rob asked.  
  
“Well, I was just trying to find out from the professor here why I haven’t received a report on yesterday’s anomaly activity. And since he seems to have ignored _all_ my emails, and my assistant would probably have got lost trying to find you, it seems I had no choice but to chase you up myself.”  
  
Nick looked guiltily at his inbox, and the message that proclaimed he had twelve unread emails.  
  
“Ah…well…I…”  
  
“It’s my fault, Ms. Johnson,” said Rob suddenly. “Jo and I were testing a new computer programme this morning and we managed to crash our computer network in here. The professor was just in the process of mailing you the report, and we hoped it had got through despite the problems. Clearly it hasn’t. I can only apologise.”  
  
“I promise you’ll have it by the end of play today,” Nick chimed in, smiling sheepishly.  
  
Christine Johnson looked at them both through narrowed eyes, and Nick suddenly realised that she didn’t believe a word of it. He held his breath. This woman could give James Lester a run for his money when it came to employing a sharp tongue on subordinates.  
  
But the woman only nodded, and then stepped from the doorway. “See that you do,” she said sharply.  
  
And then she was gone. Nick could hear her heels clacking all the way down the corridor, and he sighed in relief.  
  
“Sorry,” said Rob. “I should have mentioned the report. But, well, Nicholas normally did them, and I guess I just forgot about it.”  
  
“It’s okay,” replied Nick. “You’ve done a stellar job of watching my back since I got here. You can’t do everything. I should have thought about a report and asked you about it. My boss back in my timeline – James Lester – always demanded reports as well. Although it has to be said that I normally forgot to do them there too…”  
  
Rob laughed. “Christine and he sound like a match made in heaven.”  
  
“More like hell,” said Nick, grinning. “Look, I’ll get on to that report right now. I know Christine is just looking for a reason to shut the project down, and I’d hate to be the one to give it to her.”  
  
“Thanks,” said Rob. “If what you’ve told us is true, it sounds like there’s more to the anomalies than Christine Johnson has ever imagined. We just need to prove that to her.”


	7. Day 60

  
He dreamed.  
  
Somewhere, in the part of his mind that was aware he was dreaming, he was surprised he hadn’t already done so, that this was the first time. Or maybe he had, but he just didn’t remember.  
  
Was that a betrayal?  
  
But now Connor stood in front of him, an anomaly sparkling softly at the young man’s back and throwing him mostly into silhouette, only the dull shine of the buttons on his waistcoat and the paleness of his fingers where they weren’t covered by his gloves really visible as details.  
  
His face was in shadow, and Nick couldn’t tell if he was smiling or frowning as he spoke.  
  
“Hello, Nick.”  
  
“Hello.”  
  
“It’s good to see you.”  
  
“It’s good to see you, too.”  
  
Such a civilised conversation, when all Nick wanted to do was throw himself at Connor, grab him and never let go. But he seemed rooted to the spot, able only to see and speak.  
  
“Where are you, Nick?”  
  
 _I’m right here._  
  
“I’m lost.”  
  
“Are you coming back?”  
  
 _I hope so._  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
“I’m waiting for you.”  
  
 _Wait just a bit longer._  
  
“I know.”  
  
“Come back soon, Nick.”  
  
Connor started stepping backwards, towards the anomaly, and suddenly Nick found that he could move. He darted forward, reaching for Connor, intent on pulling the young man back.  
  
 _Don’t go!_  
  
But Connor’s hand was insubstantial as smoke – Nick’s hand slid straight through it. He tried again, grasping at Connor’s arm, his shoulder, everywhere.  
  
But there was nothing to hold on to, and Connor was getting closer and closer to the anomaly, the shards of light dancing in front of him now as well as behind.  
  
“I’m waiting, Nick…”  
  
And then he was gone.  
  
“Connor!”  
  
Nick’s eyes flew open, and the forward lunge turned into an upward jerk as he sat up abruptly, looking wildly round.  
  
But there was no anomaly, and no Connor. Just his darkened bedroom, and bedclothes tangled around his limbs, damp from his sweat.  
  
Suddenly he missed Connor with an ache so sharp it felt like it was piercing him straight through. He missed Connor’s cheerful smile, his chatter when he was excited about something, his clever hands and cleverer mind.  
  
And he missed the warm body that he could hold against him, that mobile mouth against his own, the small noises that Connor would make when Nick was driving him crazy with need.  
  
But most of all he missed the look in Connor’s eyes – the one Nick couldn’t define, but that always, _always_ made him feel like the luckiest man on the planet.  
  
He missed Connor.  
  
With a quiet sigh, Nick lay back down again, tugging sheets and covers until they weren’t constricting him quite so much, and wondering if the dampness on the pillow was _entirely_ down to perspiration.  
  
Staring into the darkness, he tried to hold on to the hope from the dream, that he would get home soon, that Connor wouldn’t have to wait that much longer. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had.  
  
Eventually, he slept again, but if he dreamed any more that night, he didn’t remember it in the morning.


	8. Day 99

  
The next anomaly was in a non-descript patch of woodland (what was it with anomalies and woodland? It was like they were attracted to trees or something.) somewhere in Nottinghamshire. It’s behaviour was just as non-descript as its location, and once more all they were able to do was sit around taking readings, watching and waiting for anything unusual to occur.  
  
Dan was wandering up and down in front of the anomaly, twirling a pen between his fingers absentmindedly as he paced. Jo was making minute adjustments to a piece of equipment, muttering to herself about settings and levels as she twiddled dials and tapped the keys on her laptop.  
  
Nick and Rob were sitting side-by-side on the tailgate of the truck, comparing notes on past anomaly experiences. Rob was endlessly fascinated by Nick’s tales of prehistoric life, dangerous as it was. And the professor could tell that Dan was listening too, whenever his meandering brought him within earshot.  
  
It was another quiet day with the anomalies, and Nick found himself wondering how long things could continue this way before something happened. Whether that something was a sudden influx of dinosaurs from the past, or Christine Johnson shutting them down due to sheer inertia, remained to be seen.  
  
“Oh, damn!”  
  
Nick looked round at Dan’s soft curse. “What?” he asked.  
  
“It’s my pen. It’s gone into the anomaly. I must have got too close to the magnetic field.”  
  
Rob shrugged. “It’s not the first pen we’ve lost that way, and it probably won’t be the last. Count yourself lucky it wasn’t something more important.”  
  
“But it was important,” Dan protested. “It was a present from my parents.”  
  
Now Jo looked up too. “Not the posh, expensive one Dad bought you when you completed your degree?”  
  
Looking upset, Dan nodded.  
  
“I _told_ you to leave it in the office! It was only a matter of time before you lost it, carting it around with you like that.”  
  
“That’s not really helping, Josephine…”  
  
“Well, what do you want me to do about it?”  
  
“I’ll go and get it,” Nick announced abruptly, cutting through the twins’ bickering.  
  
Three pairs of eyes regarded him with astonishment. “What?” he said, almost defensively.  
  
“It’s just a pen,” Dan muttered. “You don’t have to…”  
  
“It’s not a problem,” Nick assured him. “Easy, really. I’ll be back in a flash.”  
  
“But are you sure it’s safe?” Jo asked.  
  
“The anomalies are perfectly safe,” Nick replied. “I’ve already told you they’re doorways. It’s not going to fry my brain cells or anything.”  
  
“But last time you didn’t want to go through,” Dan pointed out.  
  
Nick shifted uncomfortably. “Yes, well…”  
  
“Shut up, Dan,” said Rob suddenly, his expression showing sudden understanding as to the reason for Nick’s previous reluctance.  
  
“Look, it’ll be fine,” said Nick firmly. “Like I said, I’ll be back in no time. Your pen won’t have gone far. It’s probably lying on the ground right on the other side of the anomaly.”  
  
Unwilling to give anyone any more time to try and talk him out of it, Nick squared his shoulders and walked towards the anomaly. Pausing just for a second on the threshold, he looked back at the others. “See you in a minute.” Then he stepped through.  
  
As predicted, the pen was lying on the ground on the other side of the anomaly. Nick scooped it up, took a quick look around, and then braced himself to return.  
  
Three anxious faces greeted him back on home territory, and he smiled at them reassuringly. “Here you are,” he said, handing the pen over to Dan. “No problem.”  
  
There was a moment of silence, in which Dan looked with faint incredulity at his pen, as if he expected it to have changed now it had been to the past, and Rob and Jo watched Nick carefully.  
  
“What was it like?” Jo asked eventually, in a quiet voice.  
  
“Er…” Nick thought for a moment. Then he smiled again. “Why don’t you come and see?”  
  
“Oh…”  
  
“Wow! Really?” Dan looked excited.  
  
“Why not? You should see it. You need to know how the anomalies work.”  
  
“Cool!”  
  
Rob spoke quietly. “Are you sure it’s safe?”  
  
“I’ve just been through, haven’t I? I promise, you won’t regret it.”  
  
He looked at his three companions, taking the mixture of excitement and trepidation on their faces. “Look, I’ll go first,” he said. “You all follow directly behind me, and you’ll be fine.”  
  
Rob took a deep breath, and then nodded. “Okay.”  
  
“Okay,” replied Nick firmly. He gestured them all forwards. “Come on.”  
  
He’d almost forgotten how amazing his first time stepping through an anomaly had been, but watching Rob, Dan, and Jo’s reactions, it all came flooding back. The sense of wonder, of incredulity, tinged with a little bit of fear.  
  
To Nick, the anomalies had almost become routine. He was still fascinated, still amazed, by what he saw, but at the same time that fascination and amazement had become something everyday, something that no longer surprised him.  
  
But there was no doubt that the three new travellers _were_ surprised. Shocked even. And at this moment they were providing a very good visualisation of what someone whose jaw had dropped looked like.  
  
“Where are we?” Dan asked eventually, in a hushed, awed voice.  
  
Nick looked around, studying the landscape more carefully than he had on his first visit. “Going by the climate and vegetation, I’d say we’re sometime in the Jurassic.” He pointed towards the horizon. “You see that herd of animals? They’re some kind of stegosaur. Definitely late Jurassic.”  
  
None of the three _had_ noticed the creatures until Nick pointed them out, and the expression on their faces became, if anything, _more_ amazed. None of them were palaeontologists, but even so, they’d all heard of _Stegosaurus_ , and they all watched avidly as the herd ambled along about a quarter of a mile away. Nick smiled as they gazed about themselves, taking it all in.  
  
Then Nick noticed that the stegosaur herd was starting to become agitated, as if they’d been spooked by something. He looked around, but couldn’t see anything that might have frightened them.  
  
Rob, Dan, and Jo were oblivious to the unease of the animals, not knowing enough to detect the change in behaviour, but even they couldn’t fail to notice the sudden bellowing roar that split the air. They all turned startled gazes on Nick as he frowned.  
  
“Time to go, I think,” he said seriously. The roar had come from some distance away, but he didn’t want to take any chances.  
  
“What _was_ that?” asked Jo quietly.  
  
“I’m not sure,” replied Nick. “There were plenty of predators in the late Jurassic. No T-Rexes, but things just as bad. Time to go home,” he repeated.  
  
The other three didn’t need much encouragement after hearing the bellow of the hunter, and as a group they trooped back through the anomaly.  
  
“ _Wow,_ ” said Dan fervently, as soon as they were back on home soil. Jo echoed the sentiment, while Rob just looked faintly shell-shocked.  
  
Nick grinned at them. “So, how did you like your first trip into the past?” he asked.  
  
“It was amazing!” pronounced the twins, almost in unison.  
  
Rob nodded enthusiastically, although he then cast a sidelong glance at the anomaly. “Nothing’s going to follow us through, is it?” he said.  
  
“I shouldn’t think so,” Nick replied reassuringly. “The predator has a ready made food supply in the herd of stegosaurs. It won’t need to come in our direction. And besides, I would think this anomaly will be closing fairly soon. It’s been open a couple of hours already.”  
  
“Are we going to tell Christine about this?” said Jo.  
  
Nick thought for a moment. Would telling Christine Johnson what the anomalies really were get them a bigger budget? Or would it just get the anomaly project taken out of their hands entirely? The woman hadn’t exactly made a favourable impression on him the one and only time he’d met her, and he sensed that she was the kind of person who would see the anomalies’ time-travelling properties as a way to gain a political advantage, rather than the scientific wonder it actually was.  
  
“No,” he said eventually. “We aren’t. At least, not yet. For whatever reason, no creatures have come through the anomalies in this world yet, so they’re not posing a danger. We should keep this to ourselves…for now.”  
  
The other three were still and silent for a moment, and then, one by one, they began nodding slowly in agreement.  
  
Then Dan’s eyes flickered back to the anomaly. “Wow…” he murmured again.  
  
Nick grinned and patted him on the shoulder. “Wow, indeed…” he said.


	9. Day 100

Nick sat in the semi-darkened living room, nursing a glass of Scotch in his hand. The amber liquid gleamed dully in the light from the hallway, and from the street lamp outside. He kept the rest of the lights off, preferring the darkness. It seemed fitting, somehow.  
  
It was the day after Rob, Dan, and Jo’s first trip through an anomaly. That morning he’d dutifully sent off the required report to Christine Johnson, albeit in a slightly edited version. Then he’d spent the rest of the day indulgently listening to the other three members of the team as they chattered excitedly about what they’d seen, and pestered him anew with questions about his experiences. He’d answered them all patiently, although he was fairly sure he was repeating some things he’d already told them.  
  
It was safe to say that none of them got much work done. But it didn’t seem to matter. And Christine was obviously satisfied with the report, as there was no repeat of her previous surprise visit to their office. Which was probably lucky, as they were having a hard time getting Dan to shut up about the dinosaurs.  
  
It had been a good day. Right up until the moment, that was, that Nick had noticed the date.  
  
October 4th.  
  
He’d worked it out immediately. He’d been counting every single day he’d been here in the back of his mind, and yet somehow this had snuck up on him. But there was no doubt.  
  
One hundred days.  
  
He’d been here for a hundred days. A hundred days with no sight or sound or hope of getting home. A hundred days without seeing Stephen or Jenny or Abby or Lester.  
  
Or Connor…  
  
His good mood had dissipated quickly after that, and eventually he’d made his excuses and left the office early. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw a flash of sympathy cross Rob’s face as the other man’s eyes also strayed to the calendar.  
  
Now, as he sat in the dark with his drink, he tried to tell himself it would be okay. A hundred days wasn’t that long really. Barely more than three months. There was still no reason to think the anomaly wouldn’t reopen.  
  
But it didn’t stop him missing all his friends, though. Rob and Dan and Jo, they were all nice people, and he was more grateful than he could express to them for believing him and not blowing his cover, but it wasn’t the same.  
  
They hadn’t been through everything with him. They hadn’t known him for close to a decade. And they couldn’t make him feel better with nothing more than a cheeky grin.  
  
He was too old to start the social process all over again. Too old to start getting to know people as well as he knew those he’d left behind.  
  
He missed them.  
  
 _All of them._  
  
Lifting the glass, Nick downed the Scotch in one long swallow. The liquid burned down his throat, and coalesced into a small ball of fire in his belly.  
  
It seemed to give him strength, and he felt his resolve hardening. He wasn’t going to give up. There had to be a way back. He’d be able to see everyone again, and this experience would become just another story in his repertoire.  
  
He _would_ get home. He would.  
  
He just didn’t know how yet.


	10. Day 121

Another day, another anomaly.  
  
This one had appeared in the playground of an inner city comprehensive, a bleak rectangle of cracked tarmac surrounded on all four sides by dirty brick walls with wire fencing running along the top.  
  
The location suited Nick’s mood. Despite his resolve that he would find a way home, it was pretty difficult to stay positive when anomalies hardly ever seemed to open here, never mind the one you actually wanted to appear. It took a toll that even the most optimistic person would be hard pressed to brush off.  
  
He knew he’d been taking it out on his three colleagues, knew he’d been behaving like a miserable bugger for the past few weeks, but he couldn’t seem to help it. He also knew that Rob, Dan, and Jo were giving him as much leeway as they could – they knew what he was going through, even if they didn’t understand it.  
  
But sympathy would only stretch so far, and Nick knew he really needed to pull himself together before he ended up properly pissing them off.  
  
He wandered aimlessly around the edges of the playground while the others set up the equipment. Luckily, it was half term, so the place was empty for once at 11am on a Thursday morning. They didn’t have a Jenny to smooth things over, and not having to deal with a thousand curious kids and several suspicious teachers could only make things easier.  
  
He knew his teammates – and Dan especially – were hoping they could go through the anomaly again. The young man had been practically jiggling with excitement in the truck on the way over, reminding Nick rather uncomfortably of Connor when he’d first known him.  
  
And _that_ hadn’t helped his mood in the slightest.  
  
But even so, he didn’t have the heart to deny them. He didn’t have the heart to deny _himself_. He wanted to see, to explore. If there was even the slightest chance…  
  
“Bloody hell, what was that?”  
  
Rob’s exclamation startled him out of his reverie, and Nick turned towards the three by the anomaly with an enquiring expression on his face. But they were all looking past him, to the far corner of the playground, Jo pointing frantically as he turned again.  
  
It stood about half a metre tall, bipedal with short, stubby forelimbs, and a long, tapering tail. The skin was green mottled with paler, almost yellow, patches, and the head was small with a beak-like mouth.  
  
“What is it?” Rob’s low voice carried well in the enclosed space, and the creature shifted in its corner.  
  
“It’s some kind of ornithopod,” Nick answered. “ _Othnielia_ maybe. Or it could be earlier. _Yandusaurus_ perhaps. I can’t be sure.”  
  
“But it’s a herbivore, right?” Jo asked nervously.  
  
“Oh, yes,” Nick assured her. “It’s perfectly harmless.” He took a step towards the ornithopod, and the animal immediately took off along the playground wall, only stopping when it reached the next corner. “It’s a bit nippy, though.”  
  
“Good job we closed the gate behind us when we came in, isn’t it?” Dan sounded gleeful, and for a moment Nick wondered whether there wasn’t a secret dinosaur nut hiding underneath all the quantum physics.  
  
He nodded. “We’ll have to catch it and take it home,” he said. “It shouldn’t be that difficult with four of us, even if it is fast on its feet.”  
  
Half an hour later, the phrase ‘famous last words’ seemed appropriate, as they all stood in a little cluster, panting for breath, and eyeing the ornithopod warily.  
  
The creature wasn’t just fast, it was agile too, seemingly capable of ducking and weaving around any hands trying to grab it. Nick was worried they might be stressing it out with all their attempts to catch it, but on the contrary, the animal seemed to be almost enjoying itself, now that it had got over its fear. Nick just wished it would take it into its head to go and enjoy itself back home. But it seemed to be just as good at avoiding the anomaly as it was at avoiding the four humans surrounding it.  
  
“Let’s try this again,” said Nick tiredly. “Maybe if we all get behind it, we can herd it towards the anomaly. Surely it would rather head away from us than towards us?”  
  
The plan seemed to be working at first. A certain amount of flapping and noise got the ornithopod moving towards its route home. But then, about halfway across the playground, it made a sudden break right, towards Dan’s end of the line.  
  
“Dan! _Get it!_ ” yelled Jo.  
  
With a diving tackle that wouldn’t have disgraced an international rugby player, Dan launched himself towards the creature, and _finally_ succeeded in getting his arms around it.  
  
The ornithopod squawked indignantly, struggling furiously in Dan’s grip. It had nearly escaped by the time others reached him and lent a hand, and he pulled a face as one of the powerful hind legs kicked him none too gently in the stomach.  
  
“We have to get it back through the anomaly,” said Nick. “Come on, Dan, I’ll help you.”  
  
Together they struggled over to the portal, carrying the ornithopod between them. It was still putting up a pretty good fight, and neither of them hesitated before stepping through the sparkling shards of light, and into the past.  
  
It was markedly warmer on the other side of the anomaly, and creature’s struggles increased as it seemed to sense it was back in a familiar climate. Staggering a few steps further on, Nick and Dan finally gave up about ten yards from the anomaly, and awkwardly lowered the ornithopod towards the ground. It instantly wrenched itself free, and the two men watched in satisfaction as it bounded away from them.  
  
Dan looked around. “Looks the same as last time,” he observed.  
  
“It is,” Nick replied. “Maybe not exactly the same point, but we’re still sometime in the Jurassic.” Briefly, he wondered if it was significant that the last two anomalies had led to this era, but he decided it was just a coincidence. There weren’t _that_ many geological epochs to choose from, after all, and the Jurassic itself was pretty long, in any case.  
  
He nudged Dan, who looked just as amazed as the first time. “Shut your mouth, or a fly’ll get in,” he joked. Suddenly, he could feel his mood lifting. It was silly really, but he felt like the appearance of a creature signified that the anomalies were finally behaving like he expected them to. And somehow that gave him more confidence that he would find a way home. It was a ridiculous leap of logic, but he wasn’t going to knock anything that could be a positive development.  
  
Nudging Dan again, he gestured back towards the anomaly. “Time to go home. We don’t want to worry the others.”  
  
Dan looked faintly disappointed, but nodded, and together they headed back through the anomaly.  
As soon as they were standing on solid tarmac again, Rob sent them a questioning look.  
  
“The creature’s fine,” Nick responded. “Couldn’t wait to get away from us once it realised it was home.”  
  
Jo was grinning. “Wow!” she said. “That was amazing!” She turned to Nick. “Is that what it’s always like for you? Getting so close to the creatures must be wonderful.”  
  
“Well, more often than not they’re trying to eat me,” said Nick. He smiled back at her. “But you’re right – it’s still wonderful.”  
  
“We’re going to have to tell Christine about this now, aren’t we,” said Rob, suddenly sober.  
  
Nick sighed. “I guess so,” he replied. “Now that the creatures have started coming through, things could get a lot more dangerous. We need more resources, backup.”  
  
“Will she take the project away from us?” asked Jo, looking worried.  
  
“We’ll do our best to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Rob reassured her.  
  
“You’ve got a good case,” Nick said. “You’re the only ones who have been studying them. You’ve been collecting the data and analysing it for the past year. Anyone new would take a while to get up to speed, at the very least.”  
  
“And with the new insights Nick’s given us, we have even more information now,” added Dan.  
  
Nick nodded. Now it was more important than ever that they convince Christine Johnson to give them more resources. But they also had to convince her not to take away what they’d worked so hard on.


	11. Day 124

“Uh-oh.”  
  
Nick looked up. “What?”  
  
Rob was looking apprehensively at something on his computer screen. “Christine Johnson wants to see us. In her office no less.”  
  
“Oh.” Nick raised his eyebrows. “I guess this means she read my report on yesterday’s anomaly, then.”  
  
“Seems like it. Do you think she wants to listen to your recommendations, or laugh in our faces?”  
  
“I wouldn’t like to speculate.”  
  
Rob stood up. “Come on. It won’t do to keep her waiting.” He frowned. “I just hope I can remember where her office is. It’s so long since I’ve been there…”  
  
But they found the office without much trouble, and Christine beckoned them in imperiously without lifting her eyes from the papers in front of her, reminding Nick once more rather strongly of Lester.  
  
There was another person in the office too, standing off to one side – a young man with dark hair, brown eyes, and a distinctly military bearing. He didn’t acknowledge the smiles Nick and Rob sent his way.  
  
After a few moments, Christine looked up, and then nodded towards a couple of seats. Nick and Rob sat down calmly and waited for their boss to speak.  
  
There were a couple more moments of silence, and then Christine’s eyes flicked to her computer screen. “So,” she said slowly, “I see we’ve had a creature incursion. A…” She paused for a couple of seconds, “…Jurassic era ornithopod, herbivorous and harmless. Not exactly headline news, is it?”  
  
“A dinosaur in the twenty-first century? Sounds pretty newsworthy to me,” Nick commented.  
  
“Perhaps,” Christine allowed. “But I’m not sure it warrants all these…suggestions…you’ve made in your report.”  
  
“I think they’re pretty reasonable.”  
  
“Let me see…a bigger office, a laboratory, more money and equipment so Miss Wearing can build a bigger anomaly detector, space to house animals, should it become necessary…” Christine gave them a hard stare. “How many animals do you expect to be housing, gentlemen?”  
  
“Well, now that one’s come through, surely it’s only a matter of time before…” Rob began.  
  
Christine held up a hand. “ _If_ any more creatures appear – and it is by no means certain that they will – I would expect you to do your utmost to send them back again.”  
  
“Of course we would,” said Nick. “But you never know what might happen. The anomaly could close before we have a chance to get the creatures home. And then where would we be?”  
  
“What makes you think the Home Office would want these animals kept alive?” Christine asked sweetly.  
  
“What? You can’t be suggesting…”  
  
“The simplest solution would be to have any ‘refugees’ destroyed.”  
  
“But you can’t! That’s inhumane. It’s not their fault they’re stranded millions of years from home. And besides, the opportunities for study are too important to lose. Just think of what we could learn…”  
  
Christine was looking at him curiously, and Nick felt a sharp nudge on his ankle from Rob’s foot, reminding that here he _wasn’t_ an evolutionary zoologist. With an effort, he reigned himself in. “I’m sorry. It just seems extreme, that’s all.”  
  
Waving a dismissive hand at him, Christine looked at her screen once more. “The fact remains, these creatures that we may or may not have to house are purely hypothetical. One prehistoric lizard does not an invasion make. To that end, I have decided to deny the requests you’ve made. _However,_ ” she continued, forestalling Nick and Rob’s protests, “the chance that more creatures may appear cannot be completely ignored. Therefore, I have decided that Captain Becker and his men will accompany you to the next anomaly, just in case anything should happen.”  
  
She gestured towards the man standing beside her desk – so far he hadn’t contributed anything to the discussion, and he didn’t seem particularly inclined to be friendly even after being introduced.  
  
“Great, soldiers,” Nick muttered, and then subsided again as Rob gave him another warning jab on the ankle.  
  
“Thank you, Ms Johnson,” Rob said evenly. “That seems like an acceptable compromise for now.”  
  
Christine nodded, seemingly pleased that she hadn’t had to deal with too vehement a protest. “Now, since you apparently still have no idea how to predict when the next anomaly will appear, I want you to get the captain and his men up to speed on everything you know as quickly as possible. They need to be prepared for the situations they could find themselves in.”  
  
Now Becker did show a flicker of emotion, looking almost as dismayed at the prospect of receiving a science lesson as Nick and Rob were about giving it. Privately, Nick considered it an impossible task to brief anyone on all the possible situations they could find themselves in with regard to the anomalies, but he kept that thought to himself.  
  
“Right, that’s it. You may go.” Christine waved them away, and the two men stood, exiting the office hurriedly with Captain Becker following behind.  
  
“I apologise in advance for the content of our lessons,” Rob said to the soldier, trying to draw him into conversation. “But what we know might be useful for you to know anyway.”  
  
“Are you seriously telling me we might have to deal with dinosaurs?” Becker asked sceptically, surprising them both with a whole sentence. “I didn’t like to question Ms. Johnson, but it seems a bit far-fetched.”  
  
“Oh, you’ll definitely be dealing with prehistoric creatures,” Nick promised him. “In fact, you’ll probably be sick of the sight of them before long.”  
  
“Oh, I don’t know…” Becker’s sudden smile betrayed a flash of humour. “I always wanted to be a dinosaur hunter.”  
  
Rob caught Nick’s eye and shrugged. Nick shrugged back. Maybe the soldiers wouldn’t be as bad as he feared.


	12. Day 156

The ornithopod, while it had given them the run-around, had at least been on its own. Nick could have wished for a similar experience for Captain Becker and his soldiers to cut their teeth on. Something to show them how the anomalies worked, and what sort of creatures came through, without being too dangerous or chaotic.  
  
Unfortunately, it seemed that his own personal genie was on strike on this particular day. They’d just about managed to avoid dangerous, but chaotic was definitely a word Nick would have applied to the current situation.  
  
The anomaly had opened on a building site – a small, half-finished residential estate – and disgorged a whole herd (or should it be flock, Nick wondered?) of cretaceous era theropods. Luckily, these theropods wouldn’t particularly be looking to make a meal out of humans, but there were close to twenty of them, and they were spread out throughout the building site, agitated and frightened by their strange surroundings.  
  
Nick and Rob had managed to get the site closed down for the day, although they weren’t sure that the surly foreman had really bought their story about an escaped predator from a nearby zoo – the man had eyed the cluster of soldiers suspiciously, and had been heard to question the whereabouts of animal control.  
  
But thus far he and his employees had remained outside the cordoned-off site, leaving Becker and his unit free to sweep the area, assisted by Nick and his team.  
  
“They’re _Gallimimus_ ,” Nick said quietly, as he and Rob skirted along a half- finished wall. “You know, like the ones in _Jurassic Park?_ Except Spielberg’s version lacked the feathers – they’re quite a recent discovery.”  
  
But Rob was looking at him blankly. “ _Jurassic Park?_ ” he questioned. “Spielberg?”  
  
And Nick suddenly found something else that was different about this world. He smiled a little. Connor would have been gutted.  
  
“Never mind,” he said. “Hopefully, this lot should be no danger to us. We just need to round them up and get them back through the anomaly.”  
  
Rob raised his eyebrows. “And I suppose you have a plan for that?” he asked.  
  
“Well, no, not yet,” Nick confessed. “But I’m working on it.” He frowned. “I just hope Becker and his men listened when I told them not to shoot at the creatures. These ones don’t deserve to die.”  
  
“Professor Cutter!”  
  
The quiet but vehement call came from a little way ahead. Nick saw Captain Becker standing at the corner of a completed house with the rest of his men. Dan and Jo were also with them. The twins were peering at something out of Nick’s line of sight, and as he and Rob joined the small group, they too looked round the corner to see what everyone was gawping at.  
  
The Gallimimus had gathered together on a clear patch of ground. Nick could see the markings on the dirt in preparation for the laying of the next lot of foundations, but building obviously hadn’t started in this area yet.  
  
“What are we going to do?” Jo asked.  
  
Nick watched the Gallimimus for a few moments. The creatures were obviously nervy and skittish, and seemed to have decided that there was safety in numbers after establishing that they were trapped in this unfamiliar environment. But it was clear that any attempt to make a move towards them would scatter them once more, and Nick racked his brains to think of something.  
  
His mind drifted back to the scene in _Jurassic Park_ he’d been telling Rob about. He remembered how the Gallimimus had been depicted as behaving like a flock of birds, sticking close together and all turning as one. He remembered how the human characters had nearly got trampled as the creatures passed them by.  
  
And then he remembered what had happened next.  
  
“Jo,” he said quickly, turning to the young woman. “Have you got your laptop with you?”  
  
“It’s back in the truck. I can go and fetch it. Why do you want it, though?”  
  
“Just trust me. Be as quick as you can, yeah?”  
  
Jo nodded and set off back towards the vehicles, one of Becker’s men accompanying her.  
  
Rob, Dan, and Becker all looked at Nick questioningly. “What are you planning, Nick?” Rob asked.  
  
Nick smiled. “A little incentive to get our friends moving,” he replied.  
  
Jo was gone about ten minutes, and when she returned she was carrying her laptop, and still looking puzzled by Nick’s request for it.  
  
“Right, Jo, you’re coming with me,” Nick whispered. “We need to get around behind the flock. The rest of you, stay here.”  
  
“I’m coming too,” Becker said.  
  
“But…”  
  
“No arguments, professor,” the captain continued sternly. “My men and I are supposed to be protecting you lot, and we can’t do that if you go wandering off. I’m coming with you.”  
  
“Fine,” Nick sighed. “Just make sure you’re quiet. We don’t want to frighten the creatures.”  
  
It took them another ten minutes to work there way around to the other side of the flock. There was one tense moment when Jo accidentally kicked a length of metal pipe, causing dull clang, but the Gallimimus, although they remained jumpy, didn’t startle.  
  
When Nick estimated they had come far enough, the three of them sank down behind a large earth-moving vehicle. It was parked next to the site office, and Nick prayed that the next part of his plan would work. They would be sunk if the office didn’t have up to date technology.  
  
Jo powered up the laptop, and then looked enquiringly at Nick.  
  
“Can you find a wireless network?” he asked quietly.  
  
The young woman raised her eyebrows, but nonetheless clicked the mouse a few times, and then smiled. “Got one. ‘FarnsworthHomesNW.’” She shook her head. “It’s not even secured. Idiots.” Quickly, she logged on to the internet, and then waited for the next instruction.  
  
But Nick took the laptop from her, typing a couple of terms into a search engine as he struggled to remember what the website was that Connor had been rambling on about, so many months ago.  
  
It took a couple of searches, using different terms but eventually he found what he was looking for. The website wasn’t exactly the same, but someone in this world had still felt it worth their time and effort to compile a database of monster noises from the movies, including dinosaur sounds (although where half of those sounds had come from if there was no _Jurassic Park_ here, Nick wasn’t quite sure). Nick would have suspected Connor of creating their timeline’s version himself if it wasn’t for the jealousy the young man had expressed at the thoroughness of the maintainer.  
  
“Right,” he muttered. “I really hope this thing has good speakers.”  
  
“It’s top of the range,” Jo whispered. “The speakers are pretty good.”  
  
Praying silently, Nick clicked a button on the computer screen, and instantly a shattering roar echoed through the speakers, a little tinny sounding, but surprisingly loud. Nick waited a couple of seconds, and then played the roar again, this time peeking round the end of the earth-mover to check the reaction of the Gallimimus.  
  
They were definitely upset – they were making a lot of noise themselves, and were becoming more restless by the minute.  
  
For good measure, Nick played the roar a third time. It proved to be enough. Finally deciding they were truly under threat, the Gallimimus took off – all together, and miraculously, in the direction of the anomaly.  
  
Nick saw Rob, Dan, and the rest of Becker’s men emerge from their hiding place as soon as the creatures had gone by, and instantly set off after them. Beckoning to Jo and Becker, Nick did likewise.  
  
“What was that noise?” Becker asked breathlessly, as they jogged along.  
  
“Tyrannosaurus roar,” Nick answered. “They would have hunted Gallimimus.” _And luckily the movie makers seem to have come up with a pretty good approximation of a 65 million year-old noise._  
  
The soldier gave him an odd look. “How do you know that?”  
  
“Oh. I, er…saw it in a film once,” Nick said quickly. “It was a bit of a long shot, but I couldn’t think of anything else.”  
  
Becker appeared about to say something else, but at that moment they arrived back at the anomaly to find a group of humans, and significantly, no Gallimimus.  
  
“They went back,” Rob said, clearly relieved. “The whole herd. Straight through, just like that. You must have properly scared them, Nick.”  
  
Nick smiled his own relief, knowing it had been more luck than anything else that had saved the day on this occasion.  
  
“Nick! Rob!”  
  
Dan’s call came from several yards away, within the half-constructed foundations of a house. Hurrying over to him, Nick and Rob peered down into the earthworks to see the young man standing next to the body of a Gallimimus. It was obviously dead.  
  
Nick looked at Becker as the captain came up beside him. “What?” Becker said defensively. “I wasn’t any of us. You said not to shoot them, so we didn’t.”  
  
“Its neck looks broken,” Dan said. “I think it tripped over the foundation wall, that’s all.”  
  
“A specimen,” said Rob, his eyes sparkling. “We need to study it. Surely we can use this to persuade Christine to at least give us a permanent lab?”  
  
“And we need more manpower as well,” put in Becker. “There’s no way we could have dealt with all those creatures today is the professor’s plan hadn’t worked. I need a least another unit.”  
  
Nick and Rob glanced at each other triumphantly. Things were finally happening.


	13. Day 167

Nick looked around at the new lab in satisfaction. When she caved, it appeared Christine decided to do it properly. There was more than enough room in here for them to carry out their work – indeed, one of the benches already had wiring and components scattered over its surface, evidence of Jo’s eagerness to build a better, more sophisticated anomaly detector – and Nick finally felt like the people of this timeline were taking the anomalies seriously as a threat, and as a wonder.  
  
To his right, separated from the main lab by a large plate glass window, was a smaller room they’d decided to use for examining specimens. Which at the moment meant the dead Gallimimus – it had been sitting in cold storage for the last ten days while Christine’s minions quickly arranged the new facilities.  
  
And to his left, through some double doors, was an office, one with plenty of space for the four of them _and_ their desks.  
  
They’d even managed to persuade their boss of the necessity for more military backup. Nick had almost laughed aloud when he’d realised he was agreeing with Becker about the need for more men. Lester would be astonished at his willingness to cooperate with the soldier, he reflected wryly.  
  
And what was more, the captain had had no problem colluding with Nick and Rob in order to ‘adjust’ slightly their tale of what had happened on the day of the Gallimimus incursion. No one’s report had mentioned anything about laptops and fake T-Rex roars. Instead they’d all made a point of highlighting how difficult it had been to round up the creatures with so few people, and how it was more luck than anything else that had finally seen the animals home. None of which was _actually_ really a lie.  
  
Nick smiled at Rob as he entered the new lab. “Not bad, is it?” he said, as the other man halted next to him, looking like nothing so much as a kid in a sweet shop.  
  
“I’ve got to admit, I thought we’d never get here,” Rob replied. “We’d been stuck in that pokey office for so long, I was convinced we’d never leave it.” He sent a sideways look at Nick. “Maybe you’re our good luck charm.”  
  
Nick snorted with laughter. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said. “I think hard work and our wonderful powers of persuasion had something to do with it.”  
  
“Well, gentlemen, I’m glad to see that you’re enjoying your new facilities already.”  
  
The two men turned to find Christine Johnson standing just inside the door, along with another woman that Nick didn’t recognise.  
  
“They’re just what we needed,” Nick told her, deciding that a little bit of gratitude couldn’t hurt. “We’ll be able to make much better progress now.”  
  
“I should hope so,” Christine replied. “I wouldn’t want to think my faith in you, _or_ the government’s money, had been wasted.”  
  
Nick refrained from pointing out that Christine had never had any faith in them, and that the expenditure on the new lab was long overdue. He could tell Rob’s thoughts were running in a similar vein, and wondered if he should try and persuade Christine to leave before his colleague could give her a piece of his mind.  
  
But for once Christine seemed to sense herself that perhaps she’d been less than tactful. “Right, introductions,” she said brightly, ushering her companion forward. “Professor Cutter, Mr. Ashton, this is Dr. Sarah Page. She’ll be joining your team.”  
  
“Oh, er, hello,” said Nick, shaking Dr. Page’s hand a little awkwardly.  
  
Rob shook hands too, but he looked a little confused. “Um, I’m not sure we really need any more scientists at the moment…” he began.  
  
“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not a physicist,” Dr. Page said quickly. “My field is evolutionary zoology.”  
  
“Dr. Page will provide you with expertise on the creatures that come through the anomalies,” Christine said. “Since you expect to be encountering so many of them, it seems only logical that you have an animal expert on the team.”  
  
Nick and Rob glanced at each other. Neither of them had foreseen this. But of course, with Nick keeping certain aspects of his identity a secret, he couldn’t be the dinosaur expert any more.  
  
“I’m still not sure I believe what I’ve been told,” Dr. Page was saying excitedly. “I mean, real live dinosaurs. Ms. Johnson tells me you have a Gallimimus specimen here. Is that really true?”  
  
“Er, so our dinosaur books tell us,” Nick muttered. “Of course, we’re not one hundred percent about the identification. It’ll be good to get confirmation.” He ignored the slightly suspicious look Christine was sending him, suddenly wishing he hadn’t been quite so assertive with his identifications in previous reports.  
  
“Well, lead on, then,” Dr. Page said. “I can’t wait to get started.”  
  
“I’ll leave Dr. Page in your capable hands, gentlemen,” Christine said. “I’m sure you’ll tell her everything she needs to know about the project. And don’t forget,” she added as a parting shot, “now that you have these new facilities, I expect to see some breakthroughs. The anomalies could be the most important scientific discovery of the century.”  
  
“You don’t need to tell _us_ that,” Rob grumbled in disgust, as the door swung shut behind their departing boss.  
  
Dr. Page’s lips quirked upwards. “She seems like rather a forceful personality,” she observed.  
  
“You don’t know the half of it,” Rob told her.  
  
“Right, Dr. Page,” Nick interjected quickly. “Perhaps we could give you a quick rundown on what we do, and then we can see about getting the Gallimimus out of storage for you to look at.”  
  
“Call me Sarah.” Their new colleague looked around the lab. “Everything looks great,” she said. “It’ll take me a little while to catch up with all your data, but after that I’m sure there’s going to be loads we can teach each other about our respective fields.”  
  
Nick mentally sighed as Rob led Dr. Page over to the bench that contained the elements of Jo’s new anomaly detector. Things had just got a little more interesting.


	14. Day 190

  
The clearing of a throat distracted Nick from trying to decipher Rob’s facts and figures about the latest anomaly, and he looked up to see Sarah Page hovering by his desk.  
  
She smiled. “I’ve just emailed you my section of the report on today’s events,” she told him. “I’m not sure Christine Johnson will be that interested in the minutiae of creature behaviour, but I thought it was best to be thorough.”  
  
Nick checked his computer, and sure enough, the little icon designating a new email was visible on the toolbar. “Thanks. I’ll incorporate that with everything else before sending it off.” He smiled back at her. “So, how are you finding things here? You’ve experienced two anomalies now – are you coping with it all okay?”  
  
“Amazingly, I think I am,” Sarah replied. “I do have to remind myself when I wake up every morning that I haven’t dreamed it all, but other than that it’s all going fine so far.”  
  
“Good. Well, just let us know if you need anything. Despite the amazement of it all, this job can be incredibly stressful sometimes.”  
  
 _And she doesn’t know the half of it yet._  
  
“Will do. Thanks.”  
  
Nick nodded encouragingly, and flicked his gaze back to his computer screen. But five seconds later, when he realised Sarah hadn’t left, he looked up again. “Was there something else?”  
  
“Er, well, yes, I suppose there was…”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Um, it’s a little awkward. And a little odd.”  
  
To Nick’s surprise, Sarah quickly closed the office door before perching herself on the corner of his desk. He frowned. This was all looking very clandestine.  
  
“Sarah, what is it?”  
  
“Well, it’s difficult to know how to say it,” she replied. “I might end up looking like an idiot.”  
  
“I really don’t think there’s anything you can say around here that would make you look like an idiot.”  
  
Sarah looked like she was debating whether to carry on.  
  
“Sarah, just tell me. I promise I’ll do my best to help you out.”  
  
“Well, it’s like this. Yesterday, at the anomaly site, I overheard you and Rob talking. I wasn’t eavesdropping,” she added hastily. “You just happened to be in earshot, that’s all. I don’t think you realised I was standing so close.”  
  
“It’s okay…”  
  
“Anyway, I heard you talking about the creature that had come through the anomaly…”  
  
Nick felt a sudden trickle of ice slide down his spine.  
  
“Rob asked you what it was. And you knew…you knew what it was before I’d told you, or anyone else.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
“And as far as I could see, you didn’t have a handy A-Z of dinosaurs on you. So how could you have known what it was?”  
  
“Ah. Claiming a lucky guess isn’t going to work here, is it?” Nick said ruefully.  
  
“No, I don’t think it is,” said Sarah. “I thought you were supposed to be a physicist? Or did I misunderstand Ms. Johnson? Are you and I actually supposed to be working together on the creature side of things?”  
  
“No, you didn’t misunderstand Christine,” said Nick slowly. “She thinks I _am_ a physicist.”  
  
“She _thinks_ you are? What does that mean? And if you’re not a physicist, then what are you? What’s going on here, Professor Cutter?”  
  
 _Okay, easy answer first._ “I’m actually an evolutionary zoologist, the same as you,” said Nick.  
  
“What? And Christine doesn’t know this?”  
  
“No, she doesn’t.” Nick sighed. “I said I’d do my best to help you out, didn’t I?”  
  
“I believe you did, yes.”  
  
“Then you’d better sit down properly. This is going to sound a bit crazy, even by the standards of this project…”  
  
Twenty minutes later, Sarah was looking fairly flabbergasted. But she hadn’t laughed in his face, and she hadn’t run for the door to escape the mad professor, and those were both things Nick counted in his favour.  
  
“Now do you see why Christine Johnson hired you?” he finished. “She doesn’t know she already has a dinosaur expert. And I’d like to keep that quiet,” he finished seriously. “Although I’ll understand if you don’t want to be caught up in this. If you think it’s too weird.”  
  
“I rather think I passed weird a while ago,” said Sarah. She looked like she was thinking hard. “I guess…I guess I could go along with it,” she continued slowly. “After all, it’s not like you pretending to be a physicist when you’re actually an evolutionary zoologist is really going to harm anyone, is it? I mean, we have Rob and the twins to understand the anomalies. We’re not lacking any expertise.”  
  
“Thank you,” Nick said in relief. “You don’t know how glad I am to hear you say that. It’s not an easy story to believe.” A couple of memories flashed through his mind. “Others in the past have had a hard time understanding it,” he continued, grimacing slightly.  
  
“Well, I’m not saying I really _understand_ it,” Sarah replied. “I’m not the expert on the anomalies, after all. Just the creatures. But if you say you’re from another timeline, then I believe you. I just don’t get how it _happened_.” She smiled in a slightly bewildered fashion.  
  
Nick smiled back. “Thank you,” he said again. “And look, I promise I won’t tread on your toes in any way. You’re in charge of the creature stuff – I won’t try to muscle in.”  
  
“Oh, I don’t know, I reckon we could work together on it,” said Sarah, smiling now. “From what you’ve said, it sounds like you’ve had experience with lots of creatures. I’d love to hear about them in more detail.”  
  
“You got it,” Nick told her. “Anything you want to know.”  
  
“And I’m sure we can consult on the animals we see here. So long as we’re not obvious about it, of course.”  
  
Nick nodded. “That sounds like it might work. I’m sorry for keeping you in the dark.”  
  
Sarah waved him away. “It made sense,” she replied. “I understand what would happen to you if people found out. I’m sure Ms. Johnson would see alternate timelines as a very interesting discovery.”  
  
“Either that or she’d assume I’m a nutter and lock me up,” said Nick.  
  
“Or that,” Sarah nodded, her eyes twinkling. Then she turned serious. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.  
  
“What for?”  
  
“Well, for what you’ve lost. You haven’t said much about where you’ve come from, but I can tell you really want to get home.”  
  
Nick’s heart clenched suddenly. “Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes, I do.”  
  
“Well, I’m not sure there’s much I can do on the practical side, but if you need someone to talk to…”  
  
“Thanks. That’s good to know.”  
  
As Sarah got up and left the office, Nick opened up her email and started reading. They would have an interesting time keeping it hidden, but it would be nice to have someone to talk to about the creatures again.


	15. Day 200

Two hundred days.  
  
Nearly seven months.  
  
And no way back.  
  
Nick had surprised himself with how successfully he’d managed to put his predicament out of his mind, until his talk with Sarah had reminded him of it a week or more ago. But telling her about what had happened to him had suddenly resharpened his realisation of just how stuck he was.  
  
Any hopes he’d had that working on the anomaly project in this world would allow him to discover how they could transfer a person between timelines had withered. It was obvious now that the answer was not just going to drop into his lap. If he’d only had the tiniest scrap of information about the process, then he would have had something to build on. Something to give Rob and the others so that they could investigate the phenomenon.  
  
But Helen had never told him anything beyond the simple fact of the possibility’s existence. Both he and Stephen had experienced the process firsthand, and neither of them were any the wiser about the mechanics of it.  
  
So Nick had finally admitted to himself that there were only two ways he might get home. Either the original anomaly that had delivered him here would have to reopen – and even then he had no guarantee that he could use it to return to the right timeline – or someone would have to help him.  
  
And he wasn’t putting much faith in that possibility. Helen was the only one who could give him any assistance, and he hadn’t seen her at all since he’d come to this world. He had no idea if she’d _ever_ come here. He knew she could travel between timelines – she’d demonstrated it by rescuing Stephen from his world – so she must know the secret, but that didn’t mean she’d ever visited this particular timeline. Nick didn’t even know if she was aware of what had happened to him. Although if she’d tried to cause trouble for Lester and the project team again, she would almost certainly have found out by now.  
  
But nothing could change the fact that both of his possible ways out of here required him to simply wait. Unless a miraculous breakthrough was made on the project here, he would just have to remain until fate decreed otherwise.  
  
 _But would that really be so bad?_  
  
The traitorous thought was unexpected, and yet Nick steeled himself to consider it dispassionately, despite the sharp twinge of his heart.  
  
He had only been in this world for a relatively short time, but he had already found a place in it. He had friends, and a position where he could still work with the anomalies and do some good. Yes, he also had secrets, and he had wondered lately how long he would be able to keep them, but nonetheless he had a life here now. One that he could quite easily live, if he chose.  
  
And perhaps he should. Perhaps he should once more try to stop thinking about everything he’d left behind. About his home, about the ARC, about his friends.  
  
About Connor.  
  
His heart twisted again, although he couldn’t help but smile at the memory of the young man.  
  
It was odd, really. Stephen was his closest friend, the person he’d known the longest, and when he’d died Nick had been a broken man. But it was Connor who had mended him, who had picked up the pieces. Nick still felt ashamed of the way he had treated Connor in the weeks after Stephen’s funeral, but despite all that Connor hadn’t been frightened away. He had stayed.  
  
And now it was him that Nick missed the most. Of course he missed Stephen too. And Abby and Jenny and even sometimes Lester (although possibly only by comparing him to Christine Johnson). But in only a relatively short time Connor had become closer to him than even Stephen had once been, and Nick felt the space that should have been filled by him every day.  
  
Still, if he couldn’t find a way home, would staying in this timeline really be the end of the world? Probably not, but that didn’t change the fact that he would far rather go home than remain here.  
  
He’d had no choice about coming here. And despite the friendliness of Rob, Dan, Jo, and Sarah, and the satisfying development of the anomaly project from its tiny roots to a fully-fledged undertaking, he knew he didn’t want to stay.  
  
It wasn’t the right place for him to be. He wanted to go home. He wanted to see his friends. He wanted to see Connor…  
  
But he couldn’t. He didn’t know how. Waiting was his only option, and at the moment his patience didn’t seem to be paying off. The situation looked hopeless and he didn’t know what to do.  
  
He might not have chosen this world, but right now this world seemed to have chosen him.  
  
And despite his heartache he knew for the moment that he had to make the best of it.


	16. Day 224

The five people in the corridor were quiet, each occupied with their own thoughts as they waited.  
  
Nick understood what his companions were going through. Although they’d been working on the anomaly project for a while now, and had dealt with several different kinds of creatures, none of them had ever experienced anything quite like what had happened today.  
  
The traces of shock were still visible on the faces of Rob, Jo, and Sarah. Only Becker showed no hint of emotion, as he had been trained to do.  
  
It was the first time any of them had been injured as a result of the anomalies, as well. Dan had fared the worst – they were waiting for him to emerge from the treatment room where he was having a cast put on a broken wrist.  
  
Nick himself had only narrowly escaped a similarly broken ankle – as it was, he’d ended up with a sprain bad enough to warrant the use of crutches, although he knew he would become frustrated with the aids before the week was out.  
  
Rob was sporting a bruise across his left cheek that was only just starting to show now, but would be spectacular by tomorrow. He’d also suffered a nasty gash on his arm that had required sixteen stitches and a lot of bandaging.  
  
Jo and Becker had got away with a few bumps and scrapes, nothing serious, although Jo looked almost ill as she waited for her brother to emerge.  
  
Only Sarah had remained unscathed, mostly because she had been protected by one of the trucks – although there had been a tense moment when something with big teeth had decided the vehicle might contain a tasty morsel. However, judging by the expression on her face, Nick was pretty certain the zoologist was suffering from something akin to survivor’s guilt. He’d have to talk to her later.  
  
“I’ll go and get the truck started,” Becker said suddenly. He seemed to have sensed that they needed some time to process what had happened, and Nick shot him a grateful glance and nodded.  
  
“We shouldn’t be too much longer,” he said.  
  
“Take your time.” The soldier nodded back, and then headed off down the corridor in the direction of the hospital exit.  
  
The remaining four were quiet for a few more moments, and then Jo said, in a low voice, “So, you’ve come across things like that before, Nick.” It was a statement, not a question.  
  
“Well, not precisely like that,” Nick answered. “I’m still not quite sure what that was…”  
  
“It was obviously a highly evolved predator,” Sarah interrupted him. “But not a dinosaur. Did you see the way it walked? On four legs, not two. But it didn’t look early enough to be one of the Gorgonopsids. I reckon it was maybe late Triassic. Perhaps something like _Saurosuchus_.”  
  
“Probably,” Nick agreed.  
  
“But you’ve dealt with predators before?” Jo persisted.  
  
“Yes. In fact, one of the first creatures I encountered _was_ a Gorgonopsid. That anomaly opened to the Permian. We also had a Scutosaurus and a Coelurosauravus. And I’ve also seen mososaurs, raptors, and Smilodon. Not to mention deadly creatures from the future, and other animals that can harm you even though they’re not predators.” Nick looked straight at Jo. “This is a dangerous job,” he told her. “Up until now you’ve been lucky. But I can’t promise that something like this won’t happen again in the future.”  
  
“How are you still alive?” Rob asked soberly.  
  
“Again, luck. Most of the time that’s all you can employ against these creatures.” Nick paused. “And sometimes you’re not so lucky. Good people have been lost while working with the anomalies. Good friends of mine.” For a brief moment, Nick wondered whether the people he had left behind thought he was dead, whether they had given him up as lost. He pushed the thought aside.  
  
“None of you signed up for this kind of life,” he continued seriously. “You don’t have to stick with it. No one will think any the less of you if you decide to leave now.”  
  
“We can’t do that.”  
  
As one they all turned to look at the new speaker. Then Jo jumped up.  
  
“Dan!” She threw her arms round him, and then hastily pulled back as he flinched.  
  
“Mind the arm, sis.” But he was smiling, despite the fact that he looked rather pale.  
  
Nick stood and limped over to him, leaving his crutches propped against the wall. “Glad to see you’re okay,” he said sincerely. Behind him Rob and Sarah were nodding.  
  
Dan’s smile turned rueful. “It could have been worse,” he pronounced. “I guess I was lucky, really.”  
  
“It’s funny you should say that…” Jo began.  
  
“I heard most of it, actually,” Dan said. He looked at them all seriously. “We were lucky today. And hopefully we’ll continue to be so. Because I don’t want to leave the project, and I don’t think any of you do either.”  
  
“Dan…”  
  
The young man held up his uninjured arm to silence his sister. “Are you honestly saying you could walk away from this?” he asked her. “You know you couldn’t.”  
  
Jo looked mutinous for a few seconds, and then reluctantly shook her head. “You’re right,” she sighed. “I couldn’t.”  
  
“Neither could I,” Sarah chimed in.  
  
“Nor me,” added Rob.  
  
Nick smiled as he listened to them all. It never ceased to amaze him how resilient people could be, and how they were prepared to put themselves in the line of fire if they thought it was really worth it. The anomalies and the creatures that came through them were at the same time wonderful and terrifying, and yet not one of these people were discouraged in the slightest. It was remarkable.  
  
Gently, he patted Dan on the shoulder. “Well said. Now, if everyone’s all patched up, I think Captain Becker is waiting for us in the car park.”  
  
He let Dan, Jo, and Rob go on ahead while Sarah passed him the crutches. He grimaced as he grasped the handles, and then rolled his eyes at Sarah’s amused smile.  
  
“I hate these things,” he grumbled, as they set off after the others.  
  
“The doctor said you’d probably only have to use them for a week or so, right?” replied Sarah. “I hope you’re not going to moan about them the _whole_ time.”  
  
Nick thought about what other friends of his had had to put up with when he’d been ill or injured in the past. The memories brought a smile to his own face. “I wouldn’t bet on it,” he told Sarah.  
  
“Great,” she muttered. Then she brightened. “Well, let’s see if I can distract you instead. I want to hear more about these mososaurs you encountered…”


	17. Day 231

Nick walked into the lab to find Jo seated at one of the benches, tapping away at her laptop. To the right he could see Sarah in the adjacent lab, apparently examining some specimens, and to the left, through the small window in the office door, he could see Rob sitting at his desk.  
  
Jo looked up as he approached, and smiled. “Hi,” she greeted him.  
  
“Hi,” he replied. Leaning against then bench, he settled his elbows on the top of it, getting comfortable. “How’s Dan?”  
  
“He wants to come back to work,” Jo said. “He’s going to crazy stuck at home, and he’d driving _me_ crazy as well in the process.”  
  
“He’s only been there a week,” Nick pointed out. “And it’ll only be another week before can come back, albeit in an office-based capacity.”  
  
“He likes to be doing things,” Jo told him. “He hates just sitting around. Particularly when work’s so exciting.” She looked vaguely guilty. “He’s persuaded me to take his work laptop home so he can work on some theories. You don’t mind, do you?”  
  
“So long as he’s not overdoing it, it’s fine,” Nick assured her.  
  
“Good. Although I’m not sure how much work he can actually do with one wrist in a cast. Still, he seems to be able to find a way. And he’s insisting on reading all his work emails so he can keep up with what’s going on.” Jo grinned ruefully. “Like I said, he’s driving me crazy. I wish he’d just take a while to recuperate before diving back in.”  
  
“He’s lucky to have a sister that worries about him,” Nick said.  
  
“I’m not sure he sees it like that. He thinks I’m fussing too much.”  
  
Nick laughed. “You know, he reminds me of someone else I know.”  
  
Jo looked at him for a moment. “Is that someone from where you came from?” she asked curiously.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Would that be Connor?”  
  
Nick was surprised. “How do you know about him?” he asked.  
  
“You told me about him, remember? Back when you first arrived here. But you’ve never really mentioned him since.”  
  
“Oh, haven’t I?” said Nick, knowing full well that he hadn’t on purpose.  
  
“I understand why,” said Jo hastily. Then, in a quieter voice, she added, “You must miss him.”  
  
“All the time,” Nick replied softly.  
  
“Why don’t you tell me some more about him?” suggested Jo.  
  
“Oh, I…”  
  
“Sorry, that was a stupid thing to say,” the young woman backtracked hastily. “Forget it.”  
  
“No, it’s okay.” Nick took a deep breath. “As I said, he’s quite like Dan really. And you as well, I suppose. A bit geeky.” He smiled faintly.  
  
“Hey! I am not…well, okay, maybe I’m a _bit_ geeky. But Dan’s worse.”  
  
“Well, Connor’s just as into computers as you two. And as enthusiastic about prehistoric creatures as Sarah. Getting him to sit still is practically impossible, and he’s always on about new ideas and theories. Sometimes I don’t think even I understand him…”  
  
Ten minutes later, Nick suddenly realised that he’d barely drawn breath, and that Jo was looking at him rather quizzically.  
  
“What?” he asked.  
  
“I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone talk about someone like that before. It was…well, I’m quite emotional now!”  
  
“Tell me about it,” Nick replied. His lips quirked upwards in a half-smile. “Thanks for listening, Jo. I hadn’t realised quite how much I’d been bottling stuff up. It just seemed easier to try not to think about it. About _him_. I was protecting myself, I guess.”  
  
“I get it,” Jo said. “All this must be difficult for you. I’m sorry if we haven’t seemed as sympathetic as we could have done. I guess sometimes we just forget that you’re not _our_ Nicholas Cutter.”  
  
“It’s okay. This is an odd situation for all of us.”  
  
They were both quiet for a few moments, and then Rob came into the lab from the office. He was holding a piece of paper in his hand and looked faintly shocked.  
  
“What’s that?” Nick asked him.  
  
“It’s an email from Christine Johnson,” he replied, just as Sarah entered from her own lab, having seen something was going on.  
  
“From Christine?” Nick questioned. “Let me guess, she’s not happy with our most recent reports.”  
  
“Far from it,” said Rob. “I can’t quite believe it, actually.”  
  
“What is it?” asked Jo and Sarah, almost in unison.  
  
“After last week’s incident, and because the anomalies are appearing more frequently, she’s decided the operation needs to expand again. We’re moving to new premises and getting more staff.”  
  
“What? Really?” Sarah sounded excited, and took the email from Rob’s hands, reading it quickly. “Wow, this new facility looks amazing. And she reckons it can be ready to go in less than two months.”  
  
“Isn’t wonderful what government money can do when it’s spent right?” said Rob jokingly.  
  
Sarah passed the email to Jo. “It does look fantastic,” the young woman agreed. She read further down the page. “Apparently we’ll now be working in the Anomaly Research Centre. Dan will love it.”  
  
“What?” said Nick quickly. “Can I see that?”  
  
His eyes skipped over the text at the top of the page, going immediately to the small picture of the Anomaly Research Centre at the bottom. “It is,” he breathed in amazement. “It’s exactly the same…”  
  
“What are you talking about?” said Rob.  
  
“There’s an Anomaly Research Centre where I come from,” replied Nick. “We call it the ARC for short. And it looks exactly like this.” He looked round at the other three. “It seems some things are the same around here after all.”  
  
Rob grinned. “So does this mean we’ve finally arrived, then?”  
  
Nick looked at the email again, this time reading it properly. “I would say so, yes.” He looked around at the others. “Yep, I would say we’ve _definitely_ arrived.”


	18. Day 285

  
Amazingly, the estimates had turned out to be correct, and after less than two months the new Anomaly Research Centre was ready for use. Christine Johnson had even taken on most of the organisation and planning herself, prompting Dan to wonder just when exactly she’d turned into a pod person. But Nick suspected that their boss was simply in a hurry to get them out from under her feet, as if the further away they were from her, the less she’d have to deal with them.  
  
This theory was borne out by the fact that she hadn’t bothered to show up for the ribbon cutting party, as Rob had taken to calling it, even though there were no ribbons or scissors involved. Still, that was probably better for everyone.  
  
Nick accepted a glass of champagne, and looked around himself. Tomorrow they would start helping the building live up to its name, and go back to the serious business of researching the anomalies. But tonight was a chance for everyone to have fun and celebrate what they’d achieved. Namely, getting Christine to part with a serious amount of cash.  
  
But such an impressive new facility required an impressive amount of staff, and as his gaze flicked around the central atrium of the ARC, it alighted on plenty of unfamiliar faces. He’d always been fairly sure there were people he’d never got to know at the ARC in his timeline, and now he was going to have to start the process all over again here.  
  
Bypassing all his new colleagues with the odd vague smile and quick nod of the head, Nick found his eyes drawn to Jo, sitting in front of the new anomaly detector. The young woman had been ecstatic to get the opportunity to build an even better version of the device, chattering excitedly about software expansions and improvements, and eventually coming up with a machine that looked remarkably like the one Nick was already familiar with. It seemed techno-geeks had the same sense of visual style everywhere.  
  
Watching the figure tapping away on a keyboard, working when she should have been celebrating, Nick could almost imagine that instead of a petite, blond, feminine form, it was a slightly taller man, with messy dark hair and somewhat scruffy clothing, perhaps with a trilby hat perched on his head.  
  
The image was so clear in his mind’s eye that he felt the name spring to his lips. Then Jo twisted around in her seat to call to Dan, and it was gone, its fragility bursting like a bubble.  
  
A hand on his shoulder made Nick turn himself, and he found Rob standing behind him, smiling at him.  
  
“Penny for them?” the other man asked.  
  
“What? Oh, it’s nothing, I’m fine,” Nick replied.  
  
Rob just looked at him, and Nick shrugged.  
  
“Okay, I was just thinking…well, how similar everything is. This could be my ARC. I could be at home. Except for…”  
  
“The people,” Rob supplied, nodding.  
  
Nick smiled ruefully. “Exactly. If I were at home, that would be Connor in front of the detector, and Stephen, Jenny, and Abby drinking champagne. Hell, even Lester would probably be here, although he’d likely still be up in his office, looking down on us common people.”  
  
“You mean the office that’s yours?” said Rob, looking up at the glass walled space at the top of the ramp that curved down to the atrium floor.  
  
“The very same,” Nick replied. “I’m still expecting him to appear at any moment and demand that I get out of his chair!”  
  
They both chuckled. “Does this mean you’ll be sitting up there looking down on us common people?” Rob said.  
  
But something in the way he asked the question made Nick look at him. “What’s the matter?”  
  
“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just…are we really such bad substitutes?”  
  
“What? Of course not! You know I don’t think of you that way, don’t you?” Nick sighed. “You’re not substitutes,” he said firmly. “I just…I just miss them, that’s all. You understand that, right?”  
  
“Of course I do.” Rob patted him on the shoulder again. “Ignore me. I know you want to get home. It’s only natural.”  
  
“It doesn’t look likely, though, does it?”  
  
“Don’t give up hope,” replied Rob seriously. “After all, look at all this.” He gestured around them at the ARC. “Look at what our lives involve. You’ve already moved between timelines before – who’s to say it won’t happen again?”  
  
“Thanks for the support, but I think it’s about time I started facing facts, don’t you?”  
  
“Don’t give up hope,” Rob repeated stubbornly.  
  
They were both quiet for a moment, listening to the talking and laughter of the other ARC employees, and the music filtering out of the speakers that Dan and Jo had set up. Then Rob sighed.  
  
“You know, sometimes I wonder what happened to Nicholas,” he said quietly. “ _Our_ Nicholas, I mean. Is he in your world right now? Is he stuck in the past? Is he…dead?”  
  
Nick shook his head. “I can’t answer that,” he replied. “Connor and I have talked about this before, and we never came up with a satisfactory answer. Hopefully he’s still alive somewhere, and if I ever make it home, he’ll make it back here too. But there’s no way to be sure. I’m sorry.”  
  
Rob made a dismissive movement of his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Just one more mystery that we need to work on solving, huh?”  
  
“Absolutely,” Nick told him, smiling.  
  
The other man smiled back. “Now, enough of talk like that. This is supposed to be a party. And if I’m not very much mistaken, I think a few people want you to give a speech.”  
  
Nick groaned. “Really?”  
  
“Yep, really.”  
  
“But I haven’t prepared anything.”  
  
“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. Just tell them thanks for being here, and that they’ll all do a great job on the project. They just want an excuse for a toast, really.”  
  
Nick took a quick swig of his champagne to fortify himself. “Fine. Let’s get it over with, then.”


	19. Day 300

It had been a busy day.  
  
Although they had been working in the ARC for two weeks now, everyone was still finding their feet and adjusting to the new environment. And it seemed that the building was still adjusting to them, too.  
  
Therefore, nobody had been particularly surprised to arrive at work that morning and find that the computer system had gone down overnight. There followed a tense couple of hours while Jo and two technicians got it back up and running, and everyone hoped that the storage servers in the basement had done their job and protected all their data.  
  
Luckily, it turned out that nothing of importance had been lost – although Dan had been heard to bemoan the wiping of his high scores on Solitaire, Hearts, and Minesweeper, which prompted twin glares from Rob and Jo, and an offer from Nick to give him more work if he was finding he had time on his hands.  
  
With that disaster averted, Nick had retired to his office to sign off on everyone’s latest reports and forward them on to Christine, in the process apologising for their slight lateness due to ‘technical problems’. The woman might be happy to have them at a safe distance, but that didn’t stop her from demanding what felt like more and more updates on progress.  
  
As he’d hit send on the final email, Nick had wondered to himself when doing all the paperwork had become his job. Sitting up here in this office, behind this desk, working on this computer, he was feeling more like Lester every day. He made a mental note never to tell the civil servant about this part of his adventures if he ever got home. He was sure Lester would love the opportunity to point out that Nick should now appreciate what he did for them all.  
  
Still, and unlike Lester, at least he was involved in the actual anomalies, despite the paperwork. His life still had some variety to it, and he’d vowed never to let himself become stuck behind a desk permanently.  
  
And, typically, an anomaly had been the next thing to happen that day. It was the first one since they’d moved into the ARC, and the first one on which Jo’s upgraded anomaly detector had been tested. The device performed admirably, and shortly after they’d gulped down the last few bites of their lunch, the team was on its way to an anomaly in darkest Sussex.  
  
Arriving mid afternoon, they’d found the anomaly in a field at the end of a narrow, dead-end lane, which Becker had immediately despatched two of his men to cordon off, preventing any unexpected visitors.  
  
The farmhouse the field belonged to had been about halfway along the lane, and Nick had sent Jo and Dan to spin a tale of an escaped animal from a local private zoo to keep the residents inside.  
  
Heavy rain the night before had turned the field into something of a bog, and before they were anywhere near the anomaly Nick was already wishing he’d brought some wellies. He could tell Rob and Sarah were thinking along similar lines – only Becker, in his sturdy army boots, seemed to be doing alright.  
  
The anomaly was isolated in the middle of the field, and the one advantage of the mud came into play when Nick and Sarah examined it and pronounced it free of tracks, indicating that nothing had come through the anomaly yet.  
  
Although the operative word of that sentence proved to be ‘yet’, as, after no longer than ten minutes, the anomaly suddenly disgorged a group of small mammals right at their feet.  
  
An instinctive leap on Nick’s part allowed him to tackle one of the animals before it could get past him, although the result was that both he and the creature ended up covered in mud.  
None of the others was quite so lucky as to catch their creatures first time, although the soggy ground seemed to be hampering the animals just as much as the humans, and catching them as they floundered in the mud ultimately proved to be not too difficult a task.  
  
Only one escaped the group of people gathered round the anomaly, but luckily it was rounded up by Dan and Jo, who were making their way across the field after finishing their chat with the farmer and his family.  
  
Passing backwards and forwards through the anomaly to transport the little creatures home, Nick caught repeated glances of a temperate landscape, not that different to what he was familiar with, and decided that this anomaly opened to a period not _that_ far in Earth’s past.  
  
The mammals scattered as they were released, happily in a direction away from the anomaly, and Nick and Rob took the opportunity to snap a few pictures of the environment before they returned home.  
  
And forty-five minutes later, after one further capture and return operation on a creature who didn’t realise when inquisitiveness was bad for it, the anomaly closed, and they all set off back to the ARC.  
  
Of course, when they’d got there they’d found that the hot water had gone on the blink. There had followed rather chilly showers for everyone as they washed the mud off, accompanied by some mutterings about how the building had it in for them, and then Nick set maintenance going on the problem, telling them in no uncertain terms to have it sorted by the next day.  
  
Then they’d all had a quick drink in the local pub, sharing laughter and debate about who had got the muddiest until everyone had gone their separate ways, and Nick had headed for home and his bed.  
  
It was only as he lay in the darkness, on the verge of sleep, that he suddenly remembered what day it was.  
  
Day three hundred.  
  
Somehow, it didn’t seem to matter so much now.


	20. Day 365

The dream started off mundanely enough. Nick was standing by the anomaly detector, watching Connor do whatever it was he did with the device to make it work better. They weren’t talking, but it didn’t really matter. Nick was content in the silence. It was enough that Connor was there.  
  
But then, abruptly, Connor turned to look at him. “When are you coming back, Nick?” he asked.  
  
“What do you mean? I’m right here.”  
  
Connor just looked at him, and he sighed. “I don’t know,” he admitted.  
  
“You have to come back soon,” Connor insisted.  
  
“I know that.”  
  
“But perhaps you don’t want to…” Connor didn’t seemed particularly perturbed by this thought, more considering, as if it was just an interesting theory to mull over.  
  
“Of course I do!”  
  
“Then how come you’re not here yet?”  
  
“Because I don’t know how to get back,” Nick cried. “I don’t know what to do.”  
  
Connor stood up. “It’s easy,” he pronounced. “Just come back.”  
  
“Don’t you think I wish I could?”  
  
Now Connor was walking away from him. “If you want me, you have to come to me,” he spoke over his shoulder. “It’s that simple.”  
  
“Connor, wait!” Nick started after him, glad that for once he _could_ move. He could chase after the other man.  
  
But Connor always seemed to be just too far ahead. Nick pushed through the double doors leading out of the atrium, and Connor was already at the other end of the corridor. By the time Nick made it there, Connor was further away again. Suddenly the ARC seemed to have developed endless corners and turnings and passages. And Connor was always just out of reach.  
  
“Connor, _please_ , wait for me!”  
  
“I have waited, Nick. I’ve waited for a long time.”  
  
His voice floated back from round a corner. Nick couldn’t see him any more. He picked up his pace, almost running now, but every time he turned a corner, it was only to see Connor’s arm or foot disappearing around the next one.  
  
He knew he was dreaming, he knew he would never catch up, but he couldn’t seem to stop. He had to prevent Connor from slipping away.  
  
“Connor… Connor!”  
  
And then suddenly, with startling abruptness, he _did_ catch up. Rounding another bend, he crashed back through the double doors into the atrium (trying to ignore the twists of dream geography), and Connor was standing right there, back by the detector, looking as if he had never left it.  
  
In the way of dreams, Nick managed to pull up right at the last moment, and avoided crashing into the young man. Connor was grinning at him, happily, and Nick was suddenly grinning back, not out of breath at all after the chase.  
  
“See, it really is that easy,” Connor proclaimed. “You wanted me, and here I am.”  
  
“Yes, very easy,” Nick said wryly, making Connor grin even more.   
  
Tentatively, he reached out, wondering if this would be where the dream turned around and bit him. But his hand connected, and his thumb stroked over Connor’s cheekbone.  
  
“I’ve missed you,” he said softly. “So much.”  
  
“Then come home. Come back to me.”  
  
Connor pulled Nick to him, still grinning broadly. “I’ve missed you too. Now, since you’ve managed to catch me, are you going to kiss me or not?”  
  
But as their lips touched, Nick’s eyes opened suddenly, and he found himself regarding the ceiling of his bedroom instead of Connor’s laughing brown eyes. But strangely, he didn’t feel like he’d lost something.  
  
Instead, for the first time in a long time, he felt a rekindling of hope.  
  
The shrill ringing of his mobile phone startled the smile off his face. He rolled over to snatch it up from the bedside table, noticing as he did so that it was 7.25 – nearly time to get up anyway.  
  
“Yes? Hello?”  
  
“Nick? It’s Rob.”  
  
“What is it? What’s happened?”  
  
“It’s your anomaly. It’s reopened.”


	21. Day 366

It was just _there_. The anomaly sparkled softly in the morning air, as innocent and static as if it had never gone. Nick just wanted to run towards it and hurl himself through the dancing light, and hopefully one step closer to home.  
  
But he couldn’t. Because the anomaly was not alone.  
  
“Hello, Nick.”  
  
“Helen.”  
  
“I’ve come to help you get home.”  
  
“I don’t want your help.”  
  
“You might as well say you don’t want to get home, then. Because you won’t without my assistance.”  
  
Unfortunately, this was very probably the truth, but Nick decided to ignore that fact for the time being, and ask a question instead.  
  
“How did you know where to find me?”  
  
Helen smiled. “I knew you’d followed me through the anomaly the last time we met. Although it wasn’t until the next time I paid a visit to your little team that I found out you had vanished. Unfortunately this anomaly only opens once a year, so I had to wait a while until I could come and get you. Sorry about that.”  
  
Nick homed in on one part of the explanation. “Paid a visit?” he asked suspiciously.  
  
“Oh, I ran across young Connor,” said Helen airily. “He told me you were missing. He seemed to think I might have had something to do with it, and didn’t believe me when I said I hadn’t.”  
  
“Are you surprised?” Nick resisted the urge to ask if Connor was alright. He wouldn’t give Helen the satisfaction.  
  
But Helen seemed to have worked out what he wasn’t asking anyway. Her smile widened. “So, since we both know you can’t go anywhere without my help, perhaps we’d better get down to the business of explanations. Moving between timelines is really quite simple once you know how.”  
  
“Oh, I’m sure it is. Why are you here, Helen?” Nick knew the question wasn’t tactful, and he knew he was risking a lot by asking it. The last thing he wanted was for his route home to be cut off. But he couldn’t help it.  
  
“I want to help you.” The false indignation wasn’t fooling anyone.  
  
“No, really.”  
  
“This isn’t your world, Nick. You don’t belong here.”  
  
“Technically, I don’t belong in the other world either,” Nick pointed out. “That’s not mine either.”  
  
“But you have a life there,” Helen insisted sweetly. “People miss you.”  
  
Nick sighed. “If you’re not going to tell me, then perhaps we _should_ get on with the explanations, like you suggested.”  
  
Helen was still smiling, but she looked strangely eager, as if she’d been bursting to tell him this information for a while. And she probably had, Nick realised. She had no one else to tell. No one else to share it with. It was something of an unwelcome revelation to him that, even after everything, Helen still thought of _him_ first. It made him slightly uncomfortable.  
  
“Well…” Helen began, only to break off suddenly, her eyes suddenly looking past Nick to a point behind him. “Who’s that?” she asked sharply.  
  
Nick turned to see Rob walking down the path towards them. “That’s Rob. He’s a colleague of mine.”  
  
“Colleague? Oh, you’ve been busy, then?”  
  
Nick ignored her, in favour of raising a hand to Rob. The other man waved back, and picked up the pace, coming to halt in front of him a few seconds later.  
  
“Wow, you must have driven like a bat out of hell to get here before me. Not surprising though, really. Dan, Jo and Sarah are on their way, as are Becker and his lot. They should be here in about half an hour.” Rob’s gaze flicked towards Helen, his expression showing a mixture of curiosity and wariness. “Who’s this, then?”  
  
Nick sighed. There was no escaping it. “This is Helen,” he said.  
  
“Helen? Oh, _Helen_. Your wife.”  
  
“Ex-wife,” Nick corrected him, as Helen smirked.  
  
“What’s she doing here? And more importantly, how did she get here?”  
  
“That’s just what I want to know. She says she’s here to help me get home, and she was just about to explain how when you arrived.”  
  
Rob’s eyes widened fractionally, but otherwise he didn’t express his surprise. “Oh. This I’d like to hear.”  
  
Nick looked enquiringly at Helen. “You were saying…?” he invited her.  
  
Helen smirked again, making Nick wish he didn’t have to rely on her, and then began her explanation again.  
  
“It took me a while to work out what was happening, but in the end it’s quite simple really. I’ve discovered that every time someone steps back in time to an era they don’t belong in, that action creates a small ripple in time. And that ripple causes an offshoot timeline – a parallel one – from the point at which they’ve stepped back to.”  
  
“An offshoot timeline?” questioned Rob sceptically.  
  
“That’s what I said. I’m sure Nick believes me, since he’s standing in one.”  
  
Nick didn’t say anything.  
  
“Anyway, this offshoot timeline is essentially the same as the original timeline from which the traveller came. The change is related to physics, not biology – none of this step on a dragonfly in the past and return to a drastically changed future nonsense – therefore the general evolution of the Earth remains unchanged. Oh, some species might exist for slightly longer, or one person might become someone else…”  
  
“Like Claudia and Jenny,” Nick interrupted quietly.  
  
“Exactly. But nothing major changes. The dinosaurs are still wiped out 65 million years before our present, the human race still evolves in the same way. Time just makes little alterations here and there. I don’t know exactly how or why, but that’s what happens.”  
  
Nick raised his eyebrows at Helen’s admission of ignorance, and received an arch look in return.  
“I don’t pretend to know everything, Nick.”  
  
“This is all very well,” he replied. “And as good an explanation as any, I suppose, for alternate timelines. But you haven’t explained yet how I’ve managed to end up in this one.”  
  
“Oh, that’s quite simple as well,” said Helen lightly. “If a person steps back in time through an anomaly and creates a new parallel timeline, that new timeline will have the same anomaly in it, also leading back to the divergence point. Therefore someone from either timeline can use that anomaly to move to the _other_ timeline.” Seeing that the two men still didn’t quite understand, she rolled her eyes and continued.  
  
“Nick, a year ago you stepped from _your_ present into the past, correct?”  
  
“You know I did,” said Nick shortly.  
  
“Well, what you didn’t realise was that while you were in the past, a fluctuation in that anomaly caused it to switch timelines, so it led back to _this_ present.”  
  
“So the single point in the past where the extra timeline was created can lead back to either present via the same anomaly, depending on this ‘fluctuation’?” said Rob.  
  
“That’s right. You’ve picked up an intelligent one here, Nick,” said Helen.  
  
“Leave him out of it. So you can predict these fluctuations, then?”  
  
“Actually, I can’t,” Helen said, surprising Nick again. “I don’t have enough data yet to know if there’s a pattern to them. And there could be a different pattern in every instance of these double-timeline anomalies. Or there could even be no pattern at all. It could be completely random. I do, however, have a device that can detect the them.” She rummaged in her bag and held up a contraption that looked not unlike a handheld anomaly detector.  
  
“But if you can’t predict the fluctuations, then there’s no guarantee I can get home,” Nick pointed out. “You said you’ve come here to help me, but you might not be able to help me at all!”  
  
“And if I wasn’t here you’d have no chance,” Helen retorted. “It’s this or nothing, Nick. And today is your only chance for a year.” She smiled at him. “So are you going to take me up on my offer or not?”  
  
“Nick, think about this, please,” Rob said urgently. “From what you’ve told me about her, it’s a distinct possibility she’s leading you up the garden path.”  
  
“I know,” replied Nick slowly. “And I don’t trust her as far as I could throw her. But she’s right about one thing. This anomaly only opens once a year, and if I don’t try this now, I won’t get another opportunity for a long time.”  
  
“Nick…”  
  
“Rob.” Nick turned to him, effectively blocking Helen from their conversation. “I know it seems like a long shot, but I think I have to try this. I want to get back to my own world more than anything, and this could be my only chance. Even if I did wait another year, Helen won’t be here with her doohickey then. Much as I hate to admit it, I need her. And I need to get home. Can you understand that?”  
  
Rob looked at him for a moment, and then sighed. “Of course I can,” he said softly. “I guess I’m just worried. Once you’re gone, you’ll be _gone_ , if you know what I mean. And who knows if our Nicholas will reappear or not?”  
  
“I’m sorry,” said Nick. “And I don’t know if your Nicholas will come back. But I can’t let that stop me.”  
  
“It’s okay. You should go. I won’t stand in your way.”  
  
Nick gave the other man a crooked smile. “I’ll miss you, you know,” he said. “And the others. Say goodbye to Jo and Dan and Sarah and Becker for me, will you?” Then he grinned. “You can even apologise to Christine on my behalf for all the paperwork I’ll cause her.”  
  
Rob grinned back. “Actually, I think I’ll keep out of her way as much as possible. It’s not going to be easy explaining to her what’s happened.” Then he stuck a hand out. “It was good knowing you, Nick.”  
  
“Oh, come here.” Nick drew Rob into a hug. “I will miss you. Keep working on the anomalies, yeah? Don’t give up.”  
  
“I won’t,” Rob promised.  
  
“Right. It seems it’s time to go, then.” Nick stepped back from Rob, and turned to face Helen. “I’m ready.”  
  
“Come on, then. We’re wasting time.”  
  
Taking a deep breath, Nick followed Helen through the anomaly. The last thing he saw as he looked back was Rob, watching him and smiling.  
  
The landscape on the other side looked just the same as he remembered it from the last time. So far, so good.  
  
Helen dropped her backpack to the ground, and then came to stand beside him. She was still holding the device, and she pointed to the screen.  
  
“Right, a quick lesson. Watch this readout. When it spikes into the positive side of the scale, that means that the anomaly has shifted timelines. If you step through it again then, you should find yourself where you want to be.”  
  
She pushed the device into his hands, and Nick looked at her in surprise. “You’re not waiting with me?”  
  
“Why should I? I’ve told you everything you need to know. I’ve got better things to do with my time than hang around here.”  
  
“But what about your gadget? Don’t you want it back?”  
  
“I can get another one. And I’m sure you can think of one or two people who will have a field day examining that one.”  
  
Nick thought of Connor, and nodded. “Thank you.” Then he had another thought. “But what if there’s no fluctuation? You said they could be completely random.”  
  
“That’s a possibility,” Helen said, nodding. “Well, this anomaly will remain open for another five hours. If it hasn’t switched by then, I suggest you step back through to the alternate timeline. After all, you wouldn’t want to get stuck here. Something might eat you.”  
  
Nick nodded, not liking the idea, but seeing the sense of it. “Okay. Thank you,” he said again awkwardly.  
  
But Helen just smiled at him, and picked up her bag again. “See you around, Nick,” she said, and then turned away.  
  
“Wait, where are you going?”  
  
“Anywhere I please,” her voice floated back to him.  
  
Nick watched her walking away for a few moments, and then abruptly realised he should be watching the readout on the device instead. When he glanced up again a few minutes later, Helen was gone.  
  
It took another hour for a spike to appear on the screen, and for several seconds Nick almost didn’t realise what he was seeing. Then he felt his heart start to beat very fast, and he stood up quickly from where he’d been sitting on a rock.  
  
The anomaly didn’t look any different, but he had to trust that what Helen had told him was the truth. After all, the worst that could happen was that he found himself back with Rob and the others again.  
  
Stepping up to the anomaly, he paused for a moment, taking a few deep breaths. He almost couldn’t believe this was happening, and for a split second he was almost scared. Then he shook his head at himself, and walked through the anomaly.  
  
The bright sunshine on the other side blinded him for a moment. But after a few seconds of squinting he realised that the figures surrounding him were all soldiers. And they were all pointing their weapons at him.  
  
And right in front of him, the only person not looking at him down a rifle sight, was Stephen, regarding him with a mixture of shock, amazement, and relief.  
  
Nick started to smile.  
  
He was home.


End file.
